Note :- This was given as part of our essay series and publishing for all to benefit.
Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know, whether you did or not.
Integrity is a firm adherence to a code of moral values which go hand-in-hand with character and honesty. It also has some hidden connotation such as those including uprightness, purity, probity, sincerity, decency, fidelity, trustworthiness, etc. It is something which has to be measured from within as we are faced with various situations. Integrity is the backbone of our conscience.
Integrity begins with how we get to our ends. Do we take advantage of opportunities or do we manipulate circumstance to arrive at a destination?
“Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied”, said Eudora Welty. This show of respect was not pretence, but genuine accolades for honest achievers.
Richard Buckminster Fuller said, “Integrity is the essence of everything successful”. The only key to our country attaining the status of developed nation is integrity. Integrity instils in one the idea of basic civic sense, the thought to take it upon oneself to change the society for the good.
Integrity also means to have high moral principles, but also the key to the growth of our nation, the ability to make ethical judgements in the face of diversity, to be united as a nation in spite of being faced by thousands of differences, to uphold the ideals of morality taught to us scores of years ago, to be the change and to be nothing less than oneself and find pride in it.
The history of mankind bears witness to the fact that whenever there has been a decline of righteousness and rise of unrighteousness, there have come up certain selfless and committed individuals who, through their dedication, personal integrity, noble intentions and self-sacrifice, have waged a relentless war to protect the virtuous, to destroy the wicked and to re-establish the righteousness.
Integrity can be of different types. We can have intellectual integrity, financial integrity, moral integrity etc. What we expect when we use the term integrity is a certain amount of consistency and fairness.
In the case of intellectual integrity it means that the person does not change his views or perception depending upon the circumstances or external considerations. On the same line, moral integrity would mean observing the same principles irrespective of the situation. In the case of financial integrity, it will mean that one does not aspire for somebody else’s money or property. After all corruption is the use of public office for private profit.
Let us get into the most basic question ‘Is integrity necessary for public life?’ There have been thinkers like Machiavelli in the West and the Kautilya in the East who felt that the moral standards prescribed for a private individual cannot be applied when one deals with public life. A person who has high moral standards is bound to take decisions, which are also in the public interest.
The establishment and maintenance of integrity in public life and public service requires a number of elements, including: legislation, regulations and codes of conduct; a society whose religious, political and social values expect honesty from politicians and officials; professionalism among officials; and a political leadership with the moral and political courage and will to take its responsibility, both public and private, seriously.
The observance of integrity is not a simple thing, if it is practiced properly and conscientiously, it will free the society from many of its venomous ills. Thus integrity needs to be given much importance especially in the public life so as to have a harmony in the society.
The memorable lines of H.W. Longfellow :-
“Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us, Footprints in the sands of time”.
Integrity is something that makes you do what is right even when there is no one watching you. It comes out of ones value system and is something deeply ingrained in us such that it rules out the negative influences of greed or sin wherever it exists. We all worship our gods and goddesses little realizing that all these prayers are fruitless if we cannot follow the very basic principles of social and personal integrity in life.
Intellectual integrity means our intellect does not cheat us with varying situations and circumstances. Our views and opinions on any issue do not change given different situations to suit our own interests. As educated people, we have a lot of responsibility towards our society. We should have an opinion and be able to sift the right from the wrong without seeing our vested interests in matters of public importance. It is we who hold positions in the society and as members of societies or social organizations we should voice our opinions in an unbiased manner. Public pressure has the power to shake governments. Good governance therefore starts from every citizen and not from the governments.
Financial integrity is about not becoming corrupt, not to get sold to others’ mean interests for some amount of money however big or small. Even the little speed money that we use at government offices to quicken any process or to have our work done faster is a failure of our financial integrity.
Public integrity actually stems out of personal integrity because its afterall the same value system which resides in a person that lets him make decisions even in public situations. Public integrity requires us to go and cast our votes, not give bribes, not to do or say anything that may harm the society, pay our taxes regularly etc.
Good governance is not the responsibility of the politicians who design the laws and systems for us. We should not forget that the system is in its present state because we approve of it. True, Governance is about developing good mechanisms in a society by fostering transparency, but this responsibility does not start and end with the policy makers alone. The policy makers do whatever we want them to do. By remaining silent, the politicians take us for granted. Basically we are busy in our own personal lives and our jobs. We are content with what is going on around because it does not bother us or hurt us. The brunt of all wrong policies is borne actually by the poor. And if we think we have nothing to do with them, then we are violating all standards of public integrity.
All public services are the windows to a good governance mechanism in any society. The more transparent they become and the more cordial and receptive they become, more will be the ease with which they can transact with the society. Governments need to understand this. As India gets more and more educated, politicians will realize that they can no longer fool the innocent and ignorant village folk by making false promises. Integrity to ones political ideals will eventually become the competitive edge for any political party. And for this to actually become true, we as a society have some great responsibilities to uphold. There has to be an initial kickstart somewhere to give momentum to this rise of consciousness.
In fact schools should take the first step in producing students with integrity. Moral science is one subject that we all were taught as children. Can this course be actually taken to the higher classes and if so in which form? Can we emphasize the need for social ethics and business ethics in the school level itself.
Why wait for management institutes to take this role. And can ethics and integrity be taught at the age of mid twenties when our value systems have already got developed- that’s a question we need to answer.
People should be made to realize that integrity does help build businesses and brand equity for organizations. History tells us that corrupt organizations have not been able to last long.
If we perform our civic duties responsibly, if we voice our opinions whenever things go wrong, if we can form pressure groups, if we do not accept opaque systems and policies, if we allow the press to perform its duty without fear and force, if we can educate each other, then we can definitely build a society that thrives on integrity and then good governance will not be the only result but will be a part of a larger system that thrives on goodness and fairness.
The Santhanam Committee has specifically urged upon the government to ensure that their public servants give an undertaking to the effect that they will not use their offices to secure employment for their family members. They should not make investments which are likely to embarrass or influence the discharge of their duties.
A democratic administration has to be clean and clear and it should appear to be cleaner so that people feel inspired and administrative get motivated in the higher tasks of public service. Efforts to arrest corruption and bind public servants to lead a life of austerity and discipline contribute to the enhancement of people’s faith in democratic working. In an emerging society of India’s diversity it is a gigantic task which the democratic government has taken to itself.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.