Following its withdrawal from UNESCO in 1984 citing the UN agency's "anti-Western bias", US President George W Bush last week announced that the United States will be rejoining, reports David Tresilian The decision by the United States to rejoin UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, announced by President Bush in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, comes at the end of a long campaign by UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Maatsura to encourage the US to rejoin the UN agency, which it withdrew from in 1984 citing concerns over ineffective management and anti-Western bias. Along with the United States, the United Kingdom, with the US a founding member of the organisation, whose first director-general, Sir Julian Huxley, was a British national, also withdrew in 1984, returning in 1997 following Labour Party victory in the British elections. Following the US-UK decision to withdraw, UNESCO suffered a 30 per cent reduction in its budget, forcing remaining member countries to increase their contributions and leading to a prolonged period of budgetary crisis. In his speech, President Bush said that, "as a symbol of [US] commitment to human dignity, the United States will return to UNESCO. This organisation has been reformed and America will participate fully in its mission to advance human rights and tolerance and learning." UNESCO was founded in 1946, its Constitution reflecting the post World War II mood and stating that, "since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed... peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind." Its purpose was stated as "to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed for the peoples of the world, without distinction of race, sex, language or religion, by the Charter of the United Nations". UNESCO currently has 188 member states, is based in Paris, France, and has a network of 73 regional offices in different parts of the world. In recent years, and particularly during the period in office of former Director- General Federico Mayor, the organisation has been widely criticised for vague, ill-defined programme initiatives, administrative waste, and few concrete results. In 1999, a new director-general was elected, Japanese diplomat Koichiro Maatsura, with a mandate to reform the organisation and restore its profile within the United Nations system. In interviews given after his election, Maatsura said that his aims would be to redefine the organisation's priorities, cut back administrative waste, and end the culture of cronyism that had damaged UNESCO's reputation. "Prioritising and clean-up," he said, were his aims for the organisation, with last week's decision by the Bush administration to rejoin being seen as a success of Matsuura's reform programme. The 1984 decision by the Reagan administration for the United States to leave UNESCO was a result of disagreement over several of the organisation's programmes, as well as concerns over inefficient management under the then director-general, the former Senegalese Minister of Education Amadou Mahtar M'Bow. One main disagreement was over UNESCO's decision to support a "New World Information and Communication Order" that the US said was anti-Western and supported censorship and state control of the media. In statements made by the US State Department at the time, the US said that "UNESCO has extraneously politicised virtually every subject it deals with, has exhibited hostility toward the basic institutions of a free society, especially a free market and a free press, and has demonstrated unrestrained budgetary expansion." For these reasons, President Reagan had taken the decision to withdraw from the organisation, the statements continued, concluding that "continued US membership in UNESCO will not benefit the country." Though it withdrew from the organisation at the end of 1984, the US retained its observer status, contributing to programmes coming under the UNESCO umbrella that it was interested in, such as the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the Man and the Biosphere Programme. Reports in the US press had indicated the possibility of the US rejoining UNESCO, even before President Bush's statement last week. Before last year's US presidential elections, the Clinton administration had signaled that it would support moves made in Congress to find the money necessary to rejoin the organisation, with the Democratic Party presidential election candidate, the then Vice- President Al Gore, indicating that he would support any such moves. In 1984, the US stated that when it "returns to its original purposes and principles, the United States would be in a position to return to UNESCO", and an article in the Washington Post on 17 July this year indicated some of the reasons why the United States may have chosen now to do so. Observing that "the United States had many good reasons for leaving the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation back in 1984," the article said that, "there are now just as many good reasons for returning to it." According to the article, among these were UNESCO's reform of "its top-heavy bureaucracy by cutting senior level staffing more than 50 per cent", and the organisation's turning "itself around on the issue that was the major political reason for the nearly simultaneous withdrawals of the United States and Britain: the Soviet-backed drive by Third- World authoritarians for a 'new world information and communication order'". However, just as importantly, the article continued, "there are real opportunities at UNESCO to advance the ideological interests of the international coalition against terrorism... Sept. 11 demonstrated that US security can no longer be defined in purely military terms and that the extremist offensive against American cultural values must be answered through school curriculums, working for tolerance and rationalism and the correcting of cultural misperceptions in foreign publics." "UNESCO offers an ideal forum in which to promote a realistic and positive image of the US. Its programme of cross-cultural dialogue can defuse the anger engendered by misunderstanding." UNESCO has welcomed the US decision to rejoin, a statement from the organisation's director-general saying that "I look forward to the possibility of closer collaboration with the enormous intellectual and cultural resources of the American academic and scientific communities, and fuller contact with the extraordinary cultural diversity that characterises American life... the United States' return to UNESCO supports effective reform and renewal within the multilateral system, affirming UNESCO's steady forward progress over the past years." Egypt has been a member of UNESCO since its foundation in 1946, the organisation co-ordinating international efforts to relocate the Abu Simbel monuments in Upper Egypt in the 1960s to save them from the rising waters of Lake Nasser following the construction of the Aswan High Dam. This action made the concept of world heritage familiar, the conservation and preservation of monuments of the world's cultural heritage having since become one of UNESCO's flagship programmes.
