by Kofi Annan
There were natural foundations for an enduring relationship between business and the UN’s development efforts. The campaign to eradicate poverty, to raise living standards, and, therefore, to increase personal wealth, presented enormous opportunities for businesses worldwide. International development and poverty eradication themselves created and expanded consumer markets, which can be tapped to extend the boundaries of enterprise. On that basis, business had an inherent interest in being part of the common cause of equitably distributed international development.
I also felt that international business lived in a world of responsibility, as well as opportunity. There were rights, rules, and laws safeguarding businesses and their operations. But there needed to be a forum of accountability that reminded them of their role in safeguarding the rights of others, particularly their impact on the right to freedom from want, hunger, sickness, and an early death. In a globalizing world, where public relations were also global, I felt this was a message they could not easily ignore. From my very first weeks in the job, I began giving speeches to business audiences around the world to sell the message that the UN was open, as never before, for engagement with private enterprise.
On January 31, 1999, I spoke to the corporate and political leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. I went there to launch a “Global Compact” between the private sector and the United Nations that aimed to build a broader foundation for globalization based on shared values and principles. From past meetings with leaders there, I had developed a relationship of mutual respect that I believed could be the basis for something more ambitious. I warned of the fragility of globalization and its vulnerability to a backlash from all the “-isms” of our post–Cold War world: protectionism, populism, nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, fanaticism, and terrorism. To safeguard the benefits of a global trade system and the spread of technology, however, corporations had to do more than just engage with global policymakers.
There was—and is—a great deal that they could do on their own, proactively. I didn’t want them to think they could use the excuse of dysfunctional governments and trading regimes to delay action. “Don’t wait for every country to introduce laws protecting freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining,” I urged them. “You can at least make sure your own employees, and those of your subcontractors, enjoy those rights. You can at least make sure that you yourselves are not employing underage children or forced labor, either directly or indirectly. And you can make sure that, in your own hiring and firing policies, you do not discriminate on grounds of race, creed, gender or ethnic origin.” This would have to be a two-way street: we at the United Nations would abandon our past prejudices against private enterprise, but in return I believed that global business would have to rethink its role as well as its obligations if we were to put global markets on a fair and sustainable footing.
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We also had to build partnerships and expand cooperation within the UN. But the UN’s development agenda itself was also divided, scattered across a dizzying thirty-two funds, agencies, programs, departments, and offices. As things stood, there was little hope of any cohesion or single strategic purpose among these organizations. To start rectifying this, I established the UN Development Group in 1997, which sought to bring together all of these strands to deliver a more coherent, effective, and efficient system of support to developing countries. All agencies now had to form a single UN “house” in each country of operation, all under the primacy of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) representative. These measures did not solve all our problems. The vast array of challenges in developing countries—from health, sanitation, agriculture, education, and environmental sustainability to infrastructure development—meant that a significant range of actors from the UN and elsewhere were always needed, bringing with them recurring organizational obstacles. But these new measures meant that development was finally ceasing to be a scattered set of endeavors without any shared direction, and was becoming a team effort with a common goal.
The silos dividing UN work were also why we pushed for a transformation in approaches to planning, managing, and implementing our activities in territories torn by civil war, particularly in our peacekeeping operations. It was vital that we integrate development, security, military, and political activity in our interventions in war-torn countries. The motivation was not just the need for an integrated effort in peacebuilding: it was recognition of the intimate connection between economic development and the resolution and prevention of civil wars. Poverty is not the direct cause of civil war, but poverty and failed development nevertheless create the conditions for conflict. It leads to the inequalities between ethnic groups that drive so many civil wars. It further enfeebles state functions that enable governments to respond or preempt violent challenges to their authority. And it produces large numbers of unemployed young men with little future, making them ready recruits for a violent cause.
This is a further reason why rich and poor countries are linked in their interests in international development: civil wars have a security impact far beyond their source. They suck in their neighbors, send thousands of refugees spilling into other countries, create havens for armed groups and terrorists, and they cause the spread of criminal networks and cross-border lawlessness, including piracy. In short, conflicts within states are inherent generators of global insecurity, the causes of which need to be addressed by wealthy and poor states alike.
Another big piece of the international development puzzle lay in the Washington-based financial institutions: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Formed at the same time as the UN, these were officially institutions within the UN system, but their prestige and power meant that they operated entirely separately from the UN. With major resources at their disposal and an overlapping interest in global economic issues, they had a crucial role to play in funding, guiding, and effecting efforts at international development and poverty eradication. If there was ever to be any kind of cohesive, global effort to face extreme poverty, then these two institutions would need to be involved.
But in 1997 their relationship with the UN was distant and dominated by bureaucratic turf wars. I knew we could do better. On a visit to Washington, early in the first year of my tenure, I organized a breakfast with James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, and Michel Camdessus, the managing director of the IMF. From that early meeting, we developed a relationship that over the next decade catalyzed an unprecedented level of cooperation among our three institutions.
I did not start reaching out to this wider array of protagonists in anticipation of the breakthrough that was to come in the run-up to the millennium. I was being opportunistic, hunting for any resources I could find in hopes of changing the trajectory and dynamic of international development. But once we began to build this network, pulling all the strands together, as only an institution like the UN could, a new force began to build. This alone was not decisive. Despite the changes we had ushered in, transforming the place of poverty in international affairs required something far more dramatic than just our reforms in the Secretariat. We would have to bring in the member states. But given the history of commitment to international development, it was going to take nothing less than a genuine diplomatic innovation. This would be enabled by, of all things, an accident of the calendar.
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It had been expected for some time that the UN would have its own special event to mark the millennium. It was agreed that this would involve a special summit of heads of state and government before the annual meeting of the GA in September 2000. However, other than this, the only guidance from the member states (who, by UN rules, had to choose and mandate the event) was a 1998 GA resolution: “The year 2000 constitutes a unique and symbolically compelling moment to articulate and affirm an animated vision for the United Nations in the new era.”
This uncer
tainty gave us useful leeway in how to fashion the event and the accompanying debate. The traditional role of the secretary-general for such occasions is to arrange the administrative and organizational procedures. But I sensed an opportunity to deploy our moral power as well.
Vaguely designated as being for the renewal of the organization in the new century, the event would have to cover all the major issues facing the UN. But I came to the view early on that poverty should form the core. The year 2000 saw the world with the resources, for the first time, to end extreme poverty. But poverty was still a gaping omission on the collective priority list of governments. The summit represented a rare opportunity to rectify this.
As a first step, on March 27, 2000, I issued a report, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, to be considered by all member states before the Millennium Summit. Reports of such sweep would usually be drafted in the first instance by relatively junior staff members from different departments, after which, for a period of several months, the text would be circulated and amended by other departments, agencies, and representatives of the member states. This process of to-and-fro deliberation and compromise meant that the outcome was almost always the lowest common denominator. Poverty was never going to move forward on that basis. So, instead, I tasked two senior aides from my office on the thirty-eighth floor, John Ruggie and Andrew Mack, to take the lead in producing the report without the departments taking any formal role and without consultation with member states.
Between them and a tight circle from my office, we then produced the document. The member states would decide on any agreement that they signed, but we ensured that the starting point and the basis for any debate was entirely our text.
We knew the report had both to have teeth and to be popularly accessible. Unlike most UN documents, this had to be a text that anyone could understand and engage with, as only popular accessibility could engender the accountability mechanism that would be needed later on. The major development summits and conferences of the 1990s—Copenhagen, Rio, Beijing, and others—had seen the adoption of resolutions that were complex, opaquely worded, and made no real demands on anyone. Hence, while they represented important landmarks in the growing international consensus on development, they saw little substantive follow-up. In We the Peoples, however, we set quantifiable and time-bound targets for poverty eradication, and set those targets around clear, simple, and morally undeniable goals.
Another important feature of the report was its endorsement of a more advanced concept of poverty than had been represented at the highest political level up to that time. Poverty is not a monodimensional problem involving just a lack of income. Extreme poverty represents a complex, multifaceted set of phenomena involving the denial of opportunities across many areas of life, causing and reinforcing each other. Part of poverty is a lack of income, yes, but so too is a lack of education, health care, nutrition, access to safe drinking water, the subjugation of women, and environmental degradation. An integral part of the existence of extreme poverty is also the lack of outside assistance for tackling it. We the Peoples and the MDGs sought to capture all these.
In the reality of international politics, however, because we had a document that called for major commitments by governments, this made it less likely they would ever agree to it. But there were pressures we were able to make work in our favor. We were reaping the results of our engagement with international civil society. The NGO Oxfam, for example, through its support for the “Make Poverty History” campaign, collected 2 million signatures, which they presented to me in New York during the Millennium Summit. Alongside the Millennium Assembly of UN member states, we held a number of concurrent assemblies: a Peoples’ Assembly, in the form of an assembly of international NGOs; a forum of the world’s religious leaders; and another for representatives of the various parliaments (as opposed to governments) from around the world. Along with the world’s press, these formed a moral forum, to lobby and pressure the governments sitting nearby, which was particularly significant given that many of these organizations had supporters that reached back into the countries of the governments in attendance.
The weight of popular expectation also helped us. The level of adulation and attention accompanying the buildup to the millennium around the world was such that, with a Millennium Summit involving the greatest collection of world leaders in history (it would host 147 in total), the event could only attract intense international scrutiny. The result was a palpable fear among member states that a special Millennium Summit might cause real damage to their credibility if little was achieved. This concern was motivated by the lesson of the fiftieth UN anniversary assembly in 1995. There all the major issues of the world had been discussed but without any agreement to do anything about them, and presidents and prime ministers returned from its pomp and ceremony under a cloud.
But because of how we had fashioned and produced We the Peoples, if the member states wanted an agreement, they were going to have to work with the deal on poverty that we had set up for them. There was no other deal available. Combined with the simplicity of the goals set out in the report—on rights to life, health, basic education, sanitation, and food, which no one in their right mind could deny when put to them—this made it even more difficult for the member states to reject our proposals.
There was one further measure we applied to stack the deck in our favor. To be a head of government is to be trapped in the paraphernalia and pressures of office. It is to be in the midst of countless aides and advisors, all the while worrying about the compromises that must be made to appease various domestic constituencies. Many times had we seen this interfere and obliterate agreements based around otherwise rational collective interest. But when you got them on their own, I always found even the most intransigent leaders would typically prove far more reasonable and responsive. At the Millennium Summit we set up three roundtable discussion sessions with the leaders to examine the crucial features of We the Peoples. But we also set the requirement that only the heads of state and government would be in attendance. There would be no aides or advisors in the rooms with them. This stripped them of their domestic political padding and the distractions such staff bring to negotiations. The civil servants, advisors, and presidential handlers hated this, but, very tellingly, the leaders loved it.
This tight combination of factors meant that we got the global deal we were seeking. Almost all the features of We the Peoples were then endorsed in the Millennium Declaration. The declaration was signed by every one of the UN’s 189 member states, with twenty-three other international organizations committing to its targets. Unlike previous great summits, this was not an agreement to certify the balance of power, legitimize conquest, or bolster a concept of the inviolable right of states to run themselves however they wished. This was a pledge by all states to fight the major manifestations of extreme poverty and deprivation the world over. Rather than being explicitly for the power and protection of states, this agreement redirected the principles of responsibility and accountability of all governments toward alleviating and ending the suffering of the world’s most downtrodden.
From the Millennium Declaration we would develop the eight Millennium Development Goals. These were finalized in the summer of 2001 after a process of consultation and negotiation led by John Ruggie and Michael Doyle and overseen by my able deputy, Louise Frechette, whose responsibilities included the UN’s economic and management agendas. Mark Malloch Brown, the energetic and reform-minded head of UNDP, was then tasked with the ambitious job of implementing and advocating the goals worldwide. In their basic form, the goals are:
Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
Achieve universal primary education.
Promote gender equality and empower women.
Reduce child mortality.
Improve maternal health.
Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other disea
ses.
Ensure environmental sustainability.
Develop a global partnership for development.
It is important to note that all these goals, and their subsidiary targets and benchmarks, were expressed and signed up to in some form by major member states in the years before 2000. But these pledges always suffered from a lack of momentum, petered out, or went largely unnoticed.
One of the crucial features of the Millennium Declaration as an instrument of poverty eradication was that it was signed by all nations. It set out the responsibility of the rich nations to provide external assistance, while making that assistance contingent upon an explicit responsibility owned by the developing and poor countries. In short, it was a global deal that established a universal and fully shared duty to deliver development to the extreme poor.
But further setting apart the Declaration from previous pledges to fight poverty, the member states had signed a document binding each of them to a set of concrete, time-bound, and measurable goals. Against these, they agreed, would be a list of quantifiable targets and measures, focused on a deadline of 2015. By signing the Millennium Declaration, therefore, the member states not only made a rhetorical commitment to fight poverty but permitted the birth of a system by which every member state could be held publicly accountable on the world stage. Lending this further power was the simplicity of the goals. Unlike the vast majority of UN agreements and communiqués, these goals could be understood by anyone, from the senior politician in the capital city of the wealthiest nation to the man or woman on the street of the poorest shantytown—and they articulated human needs that were so basic and obvious they were undeniable to anyone who considered them.
