By BARBARA CROSSETTE, Special to The New York Times
The United Nations, which opens its 49th General Assembly session on Tuesday, is heading into a year of unusual scrutiny as diplomats, bureaucrats, scholars and a throng of increasingly powerful nongovernmental pressure groups are prodding the vast organization to reinvent itself for a world very different than the one it has known in its first half-century of life.
The task lurks behind the celebratory hoopla planned for the coming months, when symphony orchestras and rock groups will play, thinkers will think aloud at countless seminars, dancers will dance, and children all over the world will collectively write and illustrate a book about how the United Nations looks to them. A roster of special events that have already begun and will continue into 1996 is already nine pages long.
By contrast, the coming General Assembly session is expected to be subdued, with few explosive issues on the agenda.
Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali calls this "a time to rekindle the ideals of the Charter." The aim of the United Nations Charter -- to be commemorated in San Francisco in June, 50 years after the document's signing -- was to cement a lasting peace and international well-being after devastation of World War II.
Now, after the cold war has ended, and with it the superpower standoff that often paralyzed United Nations debate, there are more calls for the world body to turn its attention to safeguarding the planet's resources, starting with its environment and its poorest people, who are the majority and are the source of its migrant populations.
Others suggest that the organization could move more aggressively into controlling the spread of nuclear weapons or intervening in human rights disputes before they become new ethnic wars.
The Secretary General has said he would like to see the organization become more active in building democratic institutions, from parliaments to a free press -- as it tried to do in Cambodia -- though this would certainly lead to a dispute over national sovereignty and the limitations of the United Nations rights to interfere in domestic politics.
There are also renewed proposals for reform and reduction in the huge international civil service the United Nations has spawned in New York, Washington, Geneva, Rome, Vienna, Bangkok, Nairobi and other cities.
But these demands come at a time when regional conflicts preoccupy the United Nations -- causing even more appointments to be made and staffs created -- and when peacekeeping operations tax the organization's finances.
"The developing countries say that the agenda for peace is consuming too much time," said Stanley Kalpage, Sri Lanka's chief delegate. "They want an agenda for development."
Small nations also fear the precedent of military intervention by bigger powers acting under United Nations sanction.
There seems to be broad agreement that the support of the United States is critical if the United Nations is to become more than an international police agency carrying out punitive expeditions against rogue governments.
"Peacekeeping, which has all the financing -- and all the heartaches -- will take up all the attention," said Shirin Tahir-Kheli, a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs at Princeton University. "But I do think that the nuclear issue, for example, should be taken up by the United Nations, and with a fraction of the cost."
Ms. Tahir-Kheli, who has been director of political-military affairs and head of Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council, said only the United States has "the clout, the stakes and the relationships" to force this issue in places like India and Pakistan, where local conciliation has always failed and the fear of nuclear war is always present.
"From the 1950's, the United States has been vibrantly active in the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, and at least in part the success of the I.A.E.A. is very much a testament to our staying the course," she said in an interview from Islamabad, Pakistan, during a visit to South Asia. "But that's a technical agency. We have been very reluctant to become involved politically."
New Attitude High Marks For Clinton
As the new General Assembly approaches, a variety of diplomats at the United Nations say they like what they have seen of the Clinton Administration.
"We are not always sure whether Clinton will move this way or that way, or whether he will move at all, but the feeling is that the Clinton Administration is much better than its predecessors at the U.N.," an Asian delegate said. He added that this change in the American attitude could not have come at a more propitious time.
President Clinton, who is to address the General Assembly on Sept. 26, can point to a series of policy changes. Congress has released about $1.2 billion to pay some of Washington's peacekeeping bills.
American officials, led by Timothy E. Wirth, Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, have made a point of listening to the concerns of developing nations and working to build consensus on issues of importance to them and to the Islamic world. This was demonstrated at the recent conference on population in Cairo, where American delegates won praise from former critics on many issues.
Steven A. Dimoff, editor of Washington Weekly Report, which monitors Congressional action affecting international organizations, said there were indications that Mr. Clinton might formally announce that the United States would return to to Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency from which it withdrew under President Reagan.
The agency, which was widely accused of mismanagement, corruption and undermining the free flow of news and information, has since been reformed under a new Director General, Federico Mayor of Spain. But returning to Unesco, which is based in Paris, could cost Washington more than $50 million a year.
"Everybody in the Administration loves Unesco, but nobody can find the money to get us back in," said Mr. Dimoff, whose newsletter is published by the United Nations Association.
Old Mistrust United Nations Still a Hard Sell
Points of friction remain, among them concerns among American diplomats that Secretary General Boutros-Ghali has thrust himself to the forefront of too much United Nations activity, not always consulting the Security Council, which has assumed a major role in world affairs since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Some American officials argue that it is harder to sell the idea of more American participation in the United Nations if a single figure is perceived to be towering over the President. Mr. Boutros-Ghali has announced that he will seek another five-year term in office after 1996.
Mr. Dimoff agrees that if the Clinton Administration is friendlier to the United Nations, the same can still not be said of many members of Congress and the American public.
"The legacy of the 1970's still haunts the policymakers' views," he said. "They define the U.N. by the experiences of the 70's, when contentious debates led to polarization."
He said teaching about the United Nations appears to have fallen off in American schools; he recently found only one reference to the organization in an 11th-grade history textbook. The United Nations Association is directing its special publicity efforts toward children in the anniversary year.
The Future New Alliances Are Forming
As the United Nations moves into its next half-century, old alliances are in flux and new ones are forming within the organization.
"I think the emergence of the European Union is very important to this process," said Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, United States delegate to the United Nations in the Reagan Administration and who now teaches French politics at Georgetown University. "It is more important than I think Americans have generally understood it to be, and I think it has big consequences for us in multilateral institutions like the U.N.
"The European Union has developed institutions for reaching agreed consensus positions on issues before they come to a discussion of those issues with the United States, or before they come to discussion in U.N. arenas," she said in a recent interview. In effect, she added, this will mean a solid bloc of votes not subject to division by American persuasion on issues where in the past a few European nations might have sided with Washington.
"It's going to be a shock to Americans to find that our best friends, the countries with whom we have been most closely associated in all these arenas, will be committed to positions almost written in stone," Dr. Kirkpatrick said.
Diplomats and nongovernmental organizations working with United Nations agencies echo those conclusions. At the population conference in Cairo, some groups bemoaned the loss of independent Scandinavian voices that could have been counted on to take more liberal positions than nations of southern Europe.
But if Europe is coalescing, the developing nations are in disarray, having lost the support of Moscow in confrontations with the richer industrialized countries.
"The unity of the Nonaligned Movement, the unity of the G-77 is not there," said Dr. Kalpage, Sri Lanka's chief delegate. "These countries are building their policies on bilateral ties with more powerful nations or with the international lending organizations -- the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund."
Sri Lanka was a founding member of both the Nonaligned Movement, which often sided with the Soviet bloc, and the Group of 77 (now with 134 members), which concentrated on economic and social problems in the third world, often demanding compensation from the West.
Third world organizations are not only weaker after the cold war, Dr. Kalpage said, but are also threatened by the economic demands of Eastern Europe and the new countries created by the breakup of the Soviet Union.
"The countries that call themselves economies in transition are vying for funds in every agency," he said. "On any issue they want to be mentioned. This is causing problems for developing countries."
The United Nations is going to try to address the problems of world poverty and the development of human resources at a conference that is to be attended by heads of state in March in Copenhagen.
Diplomats from developing nations say that the Russians have all but disappeared from view after decades of courting third world support with a variety of enticements.
"Now Moscow goes out of its way to support the United States," Dr. Kalpage said. "Or they speak for the economies in transition. They don't come around to us. They are not heard much. Their presence is diminished."
