The US has moved to withdraw from the UNESCO. It already had a rocky history with the organization, having withdrawn previously in 1984 claiming an anti US bias. What were these biases ?
The US withdrawal in 1984 from UNESCO was an interesting episode in UN history, but not one with wide reverberations. You can go through old press clippings of the story, such as here, and see that the US insisted it did not lose faith in the UN as a whole, and gave the reasons that UNESCO "extraneously politicized 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".
Some examples named in the news article there, which were given by Gregory J. Newell, the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, included:
- The time and resources earmarked for projects that the United States does not believe should be dealt with by Unesco, such as spending $750,000 in discussing Soviet-inspired disarmament proposals.
- The ''collectivist'' trends in the group, which, Mr. Newell said, promotes ''group rights'' at the expense of individual human rights.
- Efforts to promote the licensing of foreign reporters and the setting up of a ''new world information order.''
- What he said was the excessive attention given the so-called New International Economic Order, in which wealthy countries are supposed to tranfer resources to the poorer ones.
- Unesco's request for a budget increase of nearly 10 percent while other United Nations agencies were abiding by requests to keep their budgets at near zero growth, The budget for Unesco is about $200 million yearly, with the United States contributing a fourth.
Other agencies are mentioned as politicized as well, but the US claimed it was satisfied by their attempts to change that politicization.
But it's interesting to go beyond this, and look at more context. Consider, for example, the following statement:
Mr. Chairman, I would like to share with you some of the misgivings felt by my government. In my country the interest it has always expressed in UNESCO is diminishing.
As Evi Underhill notes in "UNESCO and the American Challenge", this would look to most like a statement by the US about UNESCO. It wasn't. It was made by the Swiss permanent delegate to UNESCO in 1982. The remarks continued:
We have the impression that the individual becomes increasingly subjugated to collectivism which leads to a growing tendency of an instrumentalisation of education, science, culture, and communication at the service of the state".
These statements largely echo the ones made a year later by the US. The US, for its part, noted that it believed:
Extra spending on UNESCO was funding a bloated bureaucracy, not actual goals for concrete action. One example given was that 2,428 of 3,380 employees worked in the Paris headquarters comfortably, where mid-level bureaucrats made $2,500 a month, tax free (quoting a Newsweek story from 1984). The story also noted that positions appeared to be handed out based on nepotism, as with the case of Serge Vieux, who got the job of personnel director and was the cousin of the UNESCO director's wife.
The US believed that UNESCO was trying to push arguments against freedom of the press. The Director-General released a report in 1983 claiming that a "new world information order" should be based on providing communication assistance to poorer countries, elimination of the negative effects of "certain monopolies, public or private", etc.. While the report mentioned free press, the West interpreted it (arguably rightly) as not at all supporting free press. The UK's delegate put it thusly:
This is the area of UNESCO's work which worries us most in the United Kingdom. I believe that the direction of the organization's work in this area must be most specific and carefully defined. Its aim in this field should be to promote understanding. Some of its present activity has tended to promote division...We all know only too well the weapons [governments who resist free press] have at their disposal: censorship; closure of newspapers; expulsion or imprisonment of journalists; the jamming of radio transmissions. This sorry catalogue represents actions which governments, not the independent media, can inflict...I do not believe that the text of [this] Programme reflects this adequately. We cannot ignore the potential threat of government to the individual...
In short, the West took umbrage with the idea that the independent media was as dangerous as the government to free press, and argued that UNESCO was conflating them. Furthermore, governments took advantage of the arguments made by UNESCO to restrict foreign journalism and shield their governments from scrutiny, the West argued (this is noted in "The United States and Unesco" by CC Joyner).
These studies were political and the West felt they were polemical. Furthermore, the West argued they were already studies carried out by other UN bodies, so there was no need to duplicate the work, and the West further argued that they didn't really relate to UNESCO's mandate. The West also argued that Director-General reports endlessly discussed the exploitation of developing countries by former colonial masters but never once mentioned exploitation of the people by those country's own governments. Furthermore, the West pointed out the extremely common focus on Israel, which came up in virtually any UNESCO conference on any topic, typically to attack Israel. For example, the Women's Conference at Mexico in 1975 declared that Zionism is a form of racism, and the West argued they were completely unrelated and demonstrated bias.
These claims of biases led to the US withdrawal, primarily, and to disapproval of many UNESCO practices by other Western allies. The view that the Third World and generally developing countries, who aligned with the Soviet Union, were pushing anti-US and anti-Western values through UNESCO continued to persist.