Besides the well-known building in Manhattan, the UN has three other main HQs, one of them in Vienna, where nine important organisations do the practical work

The UN headquarters in Vienna looks like a studious village when compared with the glass-curtain-walled New York headquarters, to which the discussion of peace and security issues lends a degree of solemnity. Four thousand officers bustle down Vienna’s corridors, adorned with works of art and huge photographs of peacekeepers in action. The Viennese employees say, a little defensively, that they work for the UN’s technical agencies, unlike the political nature of the work in Manhattan. The other two main UN headquarters are in Geneva and Nairobi.

The Viennese HQ is a few metro stops from the opulence of the old imperial city, in a star-shaped building from the 1970s, the Vienna International Centre (VIC): nine organisations operate from it (see Vienna Hub,). France has three permanent ambassadors in Vienna, to the UN, to Austria and to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); most other countries make do with two.

Dozens of treaties and thousands of resolutions and technical reports are negotiated every year at the VIC. Away from the public gaze, diplomats and legal experts wrangle over obscure amendments or wordings — “laundering the proceeds of crime” or “money laundering”? Sometimes the stakes are higher, as when it comes to defining an act of terrorism. On 8 September 2006 the UN General Assembly adopted a global counter-terrorism strategy, one of a sequence of treaties adopted since 1937. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), also based in Vienna, must help put it into effect by providing “technical assistance”, such as legal advice, field missions and training of magistrates.

There is a kind of global division of labour. Member states ask the UN’s technical agencies to clarify issues or regulate projects on the ground (development, scientific cooperation). Several Sahel countries asked the UNODC to produce a practical manual on fighting terrorism; other states have asked for technical assistance to combat corruption. For the big political issues, member states tend to turn to regional bodies like the EU or to powerful groups such as G8 or G20 (1).

Missing the boat

The “Gs” were set up informally by the world’s most industrialised countries, and they function like a board of directors. They allow their members to sidestep UN procedures and declare laws that have no legitimacy. “It is mainly about PR,” said Jean-Pierre Bugada, chief of communication for France and Monaco at the UN Regional Information Centre. “These meetings don’t necessarily have any concrete consequences, and the UN remains the international community’s most important tool.” He acknowledged that the organisation “missed the boat with the financial crisis”: it was the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, on the periphery of the UN system, and the World Trade Organisation, which is completely autonomous, that reacted to the crisis.

What do the UN Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) or the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido) do? Unlike the Bretton Woods institutions, these organisations are focused on development, particularly in the South, not on free trade or finance. The head of the UN’s Commission on International Trade Law (Uncitral), Renaud Sorieul, complains that its work is marginalised, even though it manages to make the needs of international development heard above the lobbying of big business. In a sign of the times, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) has been pushed back to late June to fit in with a G20 meeting.

The EU, which sees itself as a multinational of corporate law, has snubbed Uncitral’s meetings. “The Commission in Brussels doesn’t follow our work and doesn’t intervene until afterwards, when it realises it doesn’t like the text we have adopted,” said Sorieul. The EU is often paralysed, and only considers at the last minute whether UN negotiations are consistent with European law. That risks creating the contradictions that international tribunals and lawyers thrive on. It doesn’t help that the EU has no clear status within the UN: officially, it is an observer, but that doesn’t give it a vote. Some member states, such as the UK, make a point of marginalising it.

“Things could be clearer, with the G20 too,” said Florence Mangin, France’s ambassador to the UN, who explained that France had put its weight behind a resolution in May 2011, reinforcing the EU’s formal rank within UN institution. These little battles over regulations are not just symbolic: they can have concrete effects. The UN’s supremacy on the international stage is eroding partly because its founding texts retain a humanist philosophy which is alien to the globalised economic order. Besides the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which defines the UN’s values, the preamble to the UN Charter signed in San Francisco on 26 June 1945 starts: “We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined ... [and have given a mandate to] our respective governments” — a concept that does not suit the dictates of the IMF or the Franco-German leadership of the eurozone.

The UN does play a central role in international security through its Security Council, but the five permanent members with a veto set the tone; and Nato is often tasked with putting decisions into effect, as with Libya in 2011. “This is a pivotal time for international organisations,” said a senior French civil servant who wished to remain anonymous. “Member states seem to be playing it by ear: they claim to support multilateralism but are reviving bilateral relations, and forming ad hoc alliances, like before 1914, to allow them to manage specific problems, such as drugs or terrorism.”

The budgets of the UN agencies in Vienna barely cover 10% of their activities. They have to canvas their funders individually for the rest. “We set up projects at the request of member states or the General Assembly, then we look for funding,” said Mauro Miedico of the UNODC. “Only public funds, so as not to confuse things.”

Daily work unsung

Some UN agencies have suffered drastic budget cuts, and some senior officials pay their own travel expenses when they go to New York. Fixed-term contracts have become the norm for international staff, who are often highly qualified. On 23 December 2011 the UN passed a 5% budget cut for 2012/2013 (a cut of $260m in a budget of more than $5bn). “The good times of the 1960s and 1970s seem very far away,” said Bugada. “We were swimming in development money then.”

The UN has become a huge bureaucratic machine — the Secretary General employs around 44,000 people worldwide — which is active on a day-to-day basis but is not part of the mainstream debate. Certain initiatives, like the Global Compact (an initiative to encourage businesses to adopt sustainable and socially responsible policies) which began in 1999, tarnished the UN’s image with voluntary organisations. The initiative sets out to strengthen links between big business and UN agencies to make them more effective, though this might mean a conflict of interests.

A Unido officer pointed out that people only talk about the UN when things are going badly, and never praise its day-to-day work. The UN runs hundreds of health and refugee aid programmes, without which millions of people would not survive. Every agency, and every officer, at the VIC works on a specific project: preparing a treaty, negotiating, updating a code of conduct, completely a framework law, leading a working party.

In his cramped office, Niklas Hedman, from Sweden, of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa) showed me the dangers of pollution caused by the 12,000 vehicles launched into the atmosphere since the 1950s, and brought up onscreen the latest online register of space objects: “This is just the beginning of a project to inform and monitor.” On shelves behind him sat miniature satellites next to a model of Professor Calculus’s red and white moon rocket from Tintin. Unoosa functions as traffic police for outer space, deciding who is responsible in a collision. It is a sensitive issue, especially since emerging countries such as China, India and Brazil, and private companies such as Space Imaging, are all entering the race.

Airport English

UN agencies realise they need to be better at communicating with the public and have started to do this by distributing documents, opening meetings up to journalists, and consulting interested parties. They also seem keen to work with NGOs, and this collaboration can be very close, as with the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty banning antipersonnel mines, known simply as the ICBL (International Campaign to Ban Landmines).

A confusion of public and private players, who co-opt each other, may not make for a transparent, democratic process. UN officers and their NGO associates use jargon, obscure acronyms and confusing references delivered in airport English. In the corridors and canteens of the UN, the talk has been about whether to replace “MDGs” with “SDGs” at the Rio+20 summit. Even spelled out — Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals — the difference may not be apparent.

International relations have become a swirl of organisations, agencies and programmes forced to work together because of budget cuts. So Unido is cooperating with the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation), which is managing a programme with IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development), which has a mandate from the African Union, which has formed a partnership with the EU. And so it goes round...