Arts & International Affairs: Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2018 | Page 9

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Preamble. [ ... ] At its worst, UNESCO, like many other UN agencies, is a functional
tragedy of our making, suffering from power politics, lack of resources, ineffectiveness,
and material ineptitude.”
On the ideological level, UNESCO is full of good intentions, having sprouted from the
ideological tradition of humanism in the long shadow of the World Wars. From the beginning,
the organisation’s mission was clear: To make sure that the world would never
again find itself in a situation where a “great and terrible war” such as the one that had
just ended would be made possible by “the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity,
equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through
ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races” as vividly
described in the UNESCO constitution (1945:Preamble). In practice, however, the organisation
suffers from imprecision and inefficiency in the implementation of its multiple
resolutions, declarations and conventions. Despite these internal issues, UNESCO’s
constitutionally embedded idealism provides it with a mandate to implement change in
order to steer its members towards a peaceful world.
The latest example of the potential for conflict and confusion around and within the organisation
was given on the 12 th of October 2017, when the United States Department
of State formally notified that it was withdrawing its membership from UNESCO for
the second time (foreignpolicy.com 2017). The withdrawal was officially stated to reflect
their concerns with “mounting arrears at UNESCO, the need for fundamental reform
in the organization, and continuing anti-Israel bias at UNESCO” (U.S. Department of
State 2017). Following the U.S.’ lead, Israel soon announced it had suspended cooperation
with UNESCO as a result of a newly adopted draft resolution, which denied the
Jewish connections with the holy sites in Jerusalem. These developments were by no
means the first time UNESCO’s credibility has been called into question, and despite
its somewhat rocky history with the organisation, the U.S. has been merely one of the
founding members to shake the very foundations of UNESCO. The Republic of South
Africa, too, withdrew from the organisation in 1956, citing the criticism of its apartheid
policy within the organisation (Sewell 1975:326–328), and joined again in 1994 under
the leadership of Nelson Mandela. 1984 witnessed the first withdrawal of the United
States from UNESCO. Back then, the decision came about as a result of a claimed bias
in favour of the Soviet Union and accusations of politicising matters under its authority�especially
to do with the communications sector (see Coate 1988). The United
Kingdom, for reasons much resembling those of the U.S., cut its ties in 1985, only to
join again in 1997. The U.S. rejoined UNESCO in 2003, but withdrew its funding in
2011 as a result of the admittance of Palestine. This led to a financial crisis within the
organisation and gave birth to speculations about the need for deeper, structural reforms
(Hüfner 2016).
These events must be looked at as a serious obstacle to the achievability of the driving
ideal behind UNESCO: the construction of a new world built on the principles of
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