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          Given the troubled state of relations between the United Nations and its American hosts, the rapturous reaction that Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, received from European leaders during his recent international tour must have seemed a welcome respite. In capital after capital, Kofi Annan was praised for doing a fine job in difficult circumstances.
More importantly, there was a consensus that the planned reforms he outlined more than satisfactorily addressed the crisis within the organisation: a crisis that even the UN's strongest advocates conceded could no longer be denied or blamed entirely on constraints imposed by its member states.
Unfortunately, these improved atmospherics do little to lessen the dilemmas that made such a tour necessary. For despite what UN officials such as Mark Malloch Brown, Annan's new chief of cabinet, and modernisers in the pro-UN reform camp have argued, the UN's problems are not those of management systems, or any other truism of good corporate governance.
That is not to say such reforms, which Annan now seems to support, are not long overdue. The secretary-general, for all his positive innovations, has been a UN traditionalist in his tendency to take credit for the UN's successes and blame failures on member states. Anyone doubting this has only to contrast his Nobel Prize acceptance speech with the recent speech he made commemorating the Holocaust. While conceding that the international community had failed Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, he made no reference to the UN's own derelictions there, even though at the time he headed its peacekeeping department.
If the UN is prepared not just to subject its past conduct to real critical analysis (as, to be fair, it began to do under Annan's guidance with regard to the Srebrenica massacre and, less satisfactorily, the Rwandan genocide), but also to deal with its present failures and perceptions of endemic impropriety, this would represent significant progress.
There is much to clean up: the aftermath of the controversy over allegations of sexual harassment that led to the resignation of Ruud Lubbers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees; corruption allegations over the UN oil-for-food programme in Iraq and charges that UN peacekeepers sexually abused children in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Other internal issues include questions over work that Annan's son, Kojo, did with a company linked to the UN's oil-for-food programme in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Kojo Annan and the company have rejected all suggestions of impropriety, but Kofi Annan later conceded there was a "perception of conflict of interest".
On an institutional level, even the most die-hard UN defenders have not tried the usual UN gambit of blaming powerful member states for the fact that Benon Sevan, head of the Iraq programme and the man at the heart of the investigation, was allowed to continue in his post.
In another example, the UN's assertion that it would enforce a culture of zero tolerance of sexual abuse was somewhat undermined by disclosures that Annan chose not to pursue an accusation by a female UN employee of sexual harassment, despite an internal investigation last year that backed the employee's complaint.
At a recent press conference, Lubbers repeated his vehement denials of the accusations, but a terse statement later from the secretary-general's office suggested Annan's support for his embattled refugee chief was wavering. But before this, the UN secretariat's failure to act, not just on the Lubbers case, but over the sexual abuse complaints against peacekeepers in the Congo failed to inspire confidence in the reform agenda.
Even if the UN secretariat begins to behave with less secrecy and more dispatch, and shows more resolve to tackle corruption, the root causes of what Annan called the UN's annus horribilis will remain. The real challenge is defining the UN's role in a post-cold war, post-9/11 world. Should it be a servicing secretariat, along the lines of the African Union, for member states -- above all, powerful states such as the US and other permanent members of the Security Council?
If so, how does it remain faithful to the ideals of the UN charter, for instance in confronting uses of force that may violate the provisions that require a Security Council mandate, while remaining relevant and adequately funded? The pitfalls of that course have been shown by the orchestrated campaign against Annan and the UN by US conservatives angered by his description of the invasion of Iraq as illegal.
More transparency cannot alleviate, let alone solve, the basic dilemma between the UN's commitment to represent the "peoples of the world", as the charter says, and its reality as an intergovernmental organisation responsible to and largely dependent on its member states. Perhaps this is why a senior American diplomat, by no means hostile to the UN, once described it to me as "having failure inscribed on its DNA".
This is not to say there is no hope of rescuing the UN, and certainly not that it should be scrapped. It is rather to put the reforms proposed by Annan and backed by western leaders in their proper perspective. Ultimately, these are positive steps to address some, but by no means. all, of the symptoms of an institutional disease that we are likelier to find ways to live with than to cure. (The writer is a journalist and author, most recently of At The Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. FT Syndication Service)