Council insecurity: the UN at 75

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Bad boys, Whatcha gonna do? After a 31 year run, the television show Cops has been canceled. Now that a global lens is focused on the shortcomings of policing, there's a reckoning about how it's portrayed on the small screen. And the 50th installment of the frankly epic Glastonbury Festival was supposed to be this weekend. Instead, everyone's getting their live music over the Internet. It isn't the same, but the winner takes all business of live music does need some innovation. First up, though, 75 years ago this week, as the Second World War was blazing to a close, world leaders gathered in San Francisco to sign the United nations into existence.

San Francisco, the eyes of the world focus on the site of the World Security Conference as members of the United States delegation prepare for the great allied meeting to plan an enduring peace. If we had had this charter a few years ago, and above all, the will to use it, millions now dead would be alive.

President Harry Truman hailed the new body, which joined America with 50 other nations to try to prevent another global conflict.

There's a time for making plans and there's a time for action. The time for action is here now.

In the decades since the U.S. the UN has helped to avoid a third world war. It's also vastly expanded its membership and its responsibilities, everything from development to aid to peacekeeping. But this is a somber birthday. The UN Is in need of reform, and the multilateralism it embodies is less popular in some quarters than a resurgent nationalism.

Wise leaders always put the good of their own people and their own country first.

President Donald Trump's speech to the UN General assembly last year disdained globalism.

The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots and as.

The world struggles with COVID 19, relations are deteriorating between the five permanent members of the UN's Security Council. America, Britain, France, China, and Russia. So does the organization need reorganizing?

If the leaders who signed The UN charter 75 years ago could see it today, I think they might be gratified that it was still around.

Daniel Franklin is the Economist's diplomatic editor.

They'd be happy that there hadn't been another world war. That was really the motivating point behind setting the UN up in the first place to prevent wars. And they'd be surprised that it had grown so much in good ways to 193 members in bad ways, a very sprawling bureaucracy. But I think they'd also be surprised that it hadn't changed in fundamental ways, that the Security Council is still the same five permanent members that existed back in 1945. And I think when they set it up, there was the idea that it would change, it would need to have periodic revisions, and that would, I think, be a disappointment that it hasn't moved with the times as much as it might have done.

And it was put together in America with a cry for cooperation from President Truman. How has a changing America affected the UN that we see today?

Well, I think that's one of the other big surprises, in a way, that the country that was the chief architect has turned at times into the chief problem for the United Nations. And under President Trump, almost at times, you feel he's determined to undermine the creation, most recently with his decision to pull out of the World Health Organization at the time of a global pandemic. And America has grown tired of its leadership role, and that has allowed other powers to step up and to come to the fore, in particular China, but also Russia.

And you spoke this week with the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres. How do you think he views the current situation?

Well, I think Guterres sees first of all from the grand sweep of history that the UN has been through various phases. It had a bipolar phase during the Cold War, when the United States and Russia were at loggerheads, but at least at fairly predictable loggerheads. It had a rather brief unipolar period when the United States reigned supreme and other countries tended to go along with what America wanted. And now it's moved into what could be a multipolar phase.

And the truth is that we have now a very dysfunctional relationship, namely among the three biggest powers. And that dysfunctional relationship makes it very difficult for the Security Council to take adequate decisions in relation to the major.

Crisis we face, but it's still very unstable.

And what conflicts or what problems does he point to in particular that bear that out?

I think you see the Security Council often unable to take decisive action. You see also some of the major powers unwilling to go along with the rules that are supposed to be there in the system. And that's, that's been the case with Russia in Ukraine and in Syria. It's been the case with China in the South China Sea. There isn't the concerted will that the UN was designed to represent and bring to bear on those sorts of issues.

And how have the member states of the UN been responding to America's retreat?

Many of the member states have responded with alarm and a great deal of frustration and in some cases with an effort to try to get together, particularly the middle powers, to uphold the system. France and Germany, for example, have formed what they call a rather loose alliance for multilateralism. But it's not a comfortable situation, particularly with the rise of China trying to gain influence, gain strength through the UN and beyond it.

So would you say that China's rise frustrates things just as much as America's evident retreat?

Yes, I think it's very much a twin problem, related problem. As America retreats, China advances in ways that are not comfortable for the democracies of the world. China can be bullying. China is increasingly assertive within the UN. It's managed to get the leadership of four of the UN's 15 specialized agencies compared with only one that is run by an American. And it's increasingly managing to insert language that is friendly to China's view of the Belt and Road initiative or Chinese attitudes on human rights and sovereignty into UN documents. And it's doing so with increasingly strong arm tactics on smaller countries in particular.

Do you think there are any sort of structural reforms that could adapt the UN to the changing world and anything that could actually be achieved?

Well, for years now, the UN has been discussing, debating, arguing over reform, in particular the reform of the Security Council make it more representative. Today, there's no African country on the permanent membership of the Security Council. India, the world's second most populous country, is not on it. Brazil, Germany, Japan, these are countries with strong claims to be permanent members, but no one can agree who exactly the membership should be expanded to and whether they should enjoy the same veto rights that the original and current permanent five members do. So the sad thing is that the system looks desperately out of date. It really does need refreshing modernizing, but no one can agree on how. And the system is almost designed to block it happening precisely because of the vetoes that exist and the need for big majorities in the General assembly to get any agreement.

So if reform is proving so tricky, it looks so difficult to carry on. What about the notion of essentially scrapping it and starting over?

Well, that may be tempting at times. You might throw your hands up in frustration. But as is often said, if the UN didn't exist, you probably have to reinvent it and it would be quite hard. You only have to look back at the history of the very intense, long negotiations in San Francisco and before that in various summits, how really difficult it was.

Unnumbered men have died because they felt there was a job of work to be done. We too have a job of work to do if we are not to fail. These men at San Francisco there will come together representatives of the peace loving countries and fortunately they represent the great majority of the peoples of the world. These proposals have now been before the peoples of the world for their full and free discussion for almost half a year. I am confident that the goal of a world security organization is now within our grasp.

And it was really only under the pressure of the extreme conditions of wartime and the very fresh memories of millions and millions, tens of millions of deaths not only in the Second World War, but also within memory in the First World War as well, that really pressed the leaders of the day to think that they had to get this done. So I think better off to start with what you have and try and reform it. Starting from scratch, I think would risk the whole system completely unraveling.

We cannot hope here to produce a complete scheme perfect in all its elaborate details for the future ordering of the world under every possible circumstance.

Daniel, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

To hear the whole of Daniel's interview with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, you can listen to our sister podcast, the Economist asks, where he dissects the ways the UN can reinvent itself. Look for the Economist asks, wherever you get your podcasts.

Black lives matter.

Black lives matter.

Black lives matter.

The killing of George Floyd last month sparked national unrest, global soul searching, and calls to reform policing in America.

What we endeavor to achieve is equal.

Justice for the United States of America. And George Floyd is the moment that gives us the best opportunity I have seen in a long time.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a police reform bill, but it's likely to face stiff opposition in the Senate. Meanwhile, television executives have their own reckoning. The way that crime and policing are represented on screen has Also come under fire this week. The show Brooklyn Nine Nine threw out four of its new episodes in the wake of Mr. Floyd's death. But there's another far longer running show that for many Americans, was the real finger on the pulse of policing.

Bad boys, bad boys what you gonna do?

What you gonna do when they come for you?

Bad boys, bad boys Cops is a reality TV show that has been on the air for 31 years, since 1989.

Kenneth Werner writes for the Economist.

The premise of the show was simple. It followed police as they did their job.

You're gonna get tased if you don't sit down to you.

And over the course of these ride alongs with police, they would encounter drug dealers, reckless drivers, people driving while drunk, prostitutes meeting their clients, that sort of thing.

Do you have a drug problem?

No.

Are those your real eyebrows?

Yeah.

It was about to enter its 33rd season, but was canceled on June 9 by Paramount Network and its owner, ViacomCBS, amid protests over police brutality in the wake of George Floyd's killing. The show was seen as untenable and.

It was axed because of the depiction of the way cops handle crime.

Yeah. So criticism of the show had been growing for about a decade. The biggest angle of criticism was that it was seen as exploitative, catching people at their lowest moments. Lots of the people who were arrested were probably not in a position to properly consent to appear on the show. They were probably too confused or even high or drunk. The other criticism was that it was basically PR for Cops, that the show basically got access to the police in exchange for favorable coverage.

But Cops is by no means the only cop show on TV that skews a little bit from reality, right?

Yeah. So scripted shows are coming in for criticism, too. Writers and studio executives are very publicly grappling with how television distorts policing. For example, Warren Light, he's the executive producer of Law and svu. He told the Hollywood Reporter that collectively, cop shows probably contribute to society in a negative way. Dream Hampton, she's a producer and a director. She has even called for a moratorium on these types of shows.

These television shows, in their narrative, constantly.

Justify the cutting of corners, the throwing away of the constitution.

And this has real world impact.

We're talking.

And this matters a lot because crime shows are hugely popular. 60% of primetime network dramas are crime shows, and lots of people believe what they see on TV. A survey showed that over 40% of Americans think crime shows are accurate.

But even the people making the shows say they aren't, right.

And so there's criticism from a few different angles. One is that the police look more effective on tv. Most violent crimes in real life aren't solved or cleared with an arrest. Just 48% were in 2018. But, I mean, compare that with law and SVU, where all crimes are solved. The other complaint is that TV shows police in a positive light even when they're acting badly. And in that way, it normalizes police misconduct. There was a study from 2012 that looked at four American cop shows, a season's worth of each, and it found that police were acting badly once per episode on average. So they would do things like coerce confessions or trespass, but basically they were justified in their misconduct and not penalized by their superiors on the show. The gist of these findings is that breaking the rules actually made the officers look more like moral enforcers in society, that it minimized and forgave this kind of behavior. There's also the question of how race is depicted on tv. A group called Color of Change did a big study of 26 crime shows recently, and it found that rarely did racism play a part in misconduct. Racial disparities in the criminal justice system went largely unmentioned. Excessive force and incarceration were not shown to affect minorities disproportionately. I spoke with Aaron Rashawn Thomas. He's the executive producer of SWAT on cbs, and he likened network television to a buffet.

What I called, you know, it was kind of the syndrome of serving buffet food, you know, where you don't want too much spice because, you know, you need to appeal to as many customers as possible. And you avoid that by avoiding diving too far into controversial topics, which, from a business standpoint, trying to reach as many eyeballs as possible makes sense to a certain extent.

And so that might explain why a lot of these topics have gone unmentioned and uncovered by tv.

But among some of these crime shows and cop shows are more unflinching looks. The Wire springs to mind.

Yeah, so the Wire's a great example. There's also this shield, which was on fx. Both of those shows showed bad cops, and it didn't absolve them. The Wire is critically acclaimed because it humanized cops and criminals in equal measure. It looked at poverty, drugs, racism, and its subject was really the problem solving of institutions. So it's seen as being more realistic than lots of cop shows out there. I spoke to Peter Moskos. He's a former cop in Baltimore who now teaches at John Jay College in New York. And in his view, the Wire came closest to giving an accurate depiction of the job. The fact is that when cops do their job well, it should be boring. No car chases, no shootings. Most cops will never fire their gun in an encounter on the job.

But that doesn't make for such exciting television, I suppose. I mean, do you get a sense that this current cultural moment will at last kind of impinge on what the networks think they need?

I don't think that these shows are going anywhere. The fact is Hollywood has made a lot of money from them. Hollywood is a pretty risk averse and conservative industry, but you might see studios do more shows about the policed or the wrongfully accused. I think as viewers have gotten savvier, people are just ready for more nuanced conversations on tv.

Kenneth, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks for having.

Bring your sunnies and your wellies in a brawley. It's festival season again. Or at least it would be if not for the pandemic.

In normal times, people at Glastonbury would be partying away right now. It's the 50th anniversary of the Glastonbury festival.

Henry Tricks writes Schumpeter, our column on global business.

However, this is actually going to be a festival less summer. Glastonbury is cancelled and pretty much every live music event is around the world as well because of the pandemic.

And how important are festivals like Glastonbury to the music industry as a whole?

So festivals are now the biggest way for music promoters to make money. But it wasn't always like this. In fact, tickets for that first Glastonbury Festival in 1970 cost £1. But a lot has changed since then. And as sales from recordings have dwindled, those from live music have increased. But there's a downside to this, and that is that while there's been this kind of incredible creative effervescence over the years in rock music, in live music it seems to have just become a little bit more stodgy, a bit more bombastic, and certainly a lot more expensive.

And what caused that change? Why would changing from making money from the recordings to making money from the performances change the nature of the industry itself?

Essentially, it's an industry that's been rolled up from a very fragmented industry into one that's in the hands of a very few big companies. And if one company gets the credit, if you like, and the blame for this kind of capitalist corporatist upheaval within rock and roll, it's Live Nation. This is an American firm that's Gone global. It had 11 and a half billion dollars of revenues last year. It's the world's largest Entertainment company. In 2010, it bought Ticketmaster, which is the world's biggest ticketing agency. Since then, revenues have increased every year and so have ticket prices. I guess it's important to point out that Live Nation and the other companies are not making massive profits out of these concerts. In fact, they generate very wafer thin margins. But it leads to all sorts of ancillary and profitable businesses. So, you know, the sale of beer, the service fees from Ticketmasters, all this stuff really means that in this sort of winner takes all market that is live music, Live Nation is the biggest winner of all.

But clearly the pandemic has unpicked all of that.

It's been a devastating few months for the live music industry around the world. I mean, the place where people stand in front of the main stage of a big festival has to be one of the most overcrowded places on earth. So live music is unlikely to restart anytime soon, possibly not until well into next year. And this has caused a tremendous amount of hardship, not just for the promotion companies like Live Nation, but it's also the musicians, in particular the roadies. Everyone is suffering and it's likely to be even harder when concerts start again, simply because there's going to be less money in fans pockets because of recession. And of course social distancing is going to make the mosh pit a very strong, strange place to be.

But I know a lot of the artists that I might have gone to see live I'm now seeing in streaming form.

It's possible that live music could receive the biggest jolt as a result of this pandemic than it's seen in one or two decades. Live streaming is proving to be a remarkable way for musicians to get directly to their fans. It started with megastars like Elton John and others doing concerts to raise money for frontline workers, for example. But it's suddenly become incredibly profitable for some of the big acts. It's interesting. Glastonbury itself provides a clue for how this could develop. It's been streaming on the BBC for years now, but that doesn't seem to have affected ticket attendance. People are always, I think, going to be keen to spend time in a field tired, muddy and hungover, even if they could watch Glastonbury from their sofa.

So have you ever been to Glastonbury yourself?

I have some shameful memories of Glastonbury. I grew up very close to where the festival is and so we used to sneak in. This was when festivals were at their essence. Somehow Glastonbury's retain that feeling. Now it's all about the music and the madness. It's still not about the money.

We'll both get back there eventually. Henry, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. For a lot more analysis like this, subscribe to the Economist. To find the best introductory offer wherever you are, just go to economist.com intelligenceoffer and see you back here on Monday. Sam.