And Back into the New Era

Abstract

The word and concept ‘reform’ has been overworked in relation to the UN. Annan’s package of July 1997 provoked a mass of examinations, which were probably both unjustified by their content and the advance heralding they received. Furthermore, the UN had undergone a surfeit of analysis and been fed an oversufficiency of advice on its 50^th birthday. The end of the Cold War had already prompted further guidelines about political etiquette for the new political era. It has become a truism that the UN probably missed its opportunity to establish its role in this new political order. Bosnia and Rwanda are held up, in particular, as striking examples of failure by the world body. Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general for much but not all of this era, has received much of the blame. Perhaps it only reinforced the view that his professional training, that of an academic historian, could not have been preparation to cope with the exigencies of an historical political turning-point. But he could not have been completely unprepared for he had been for some years an uneasy but important member of the Egyptian cabinet as deputy foreign minister in President Anwar Sadat’s time.