“The great force on which we must rely is the hatred of the cruelty and waste of war which now exists. As soon as the war is over the process of oblivion sets in...,” Lord Robert Cecil wrote as the war drew to an end. “It is only, therefore, while the recollection of all we have been through is burning fresh that we can hope to overcome the inevitable opposition and establish...a new and better organization of the nations of the world.”
Cecil, a member of Britain’s Imperial War Cabinet, wrote that at the end of World War I, and the organization he hoped could prevent another such war was the League of Nations. It failed, of course, and so we got World War II, which killed five times as many people. By the end of that one, nuclear weapons were being dropped on cities — so the victors had no choice but to clone the league, making some significant improvements, and try again. Sixty years ago last Sunday (June 26), the Charter of the United Nations was signed by fifty nations in San Francisco.
There was not a single idealist among the men and women who signed the charter. They were badly frightened people who had lived through the worst war in human history and who feared that an even worse one lay in wait for their children. They were so frightened that they were even willing to give up the most important aspect of national sovereignty: The right to wage war against other countries. Six decades later, how is their organization doing?
Two things cannot be denied: The UN has already survived three times longer than its ill-starred predecessor, and the great war it was meant to prevent has not happened. In the various crises that might have ended with the superpowers sliding into a nuclear war — the Cuban crisis of 1962, the Middle East war of 1973, and so on — the United Nations Security Council was an essential forum for negotiations, and the charter provided a new kind of international law that the rivals could defer to without losing face when they wanted to back away from the crisis.
So why is the United Nations so widely disdained today? One reason is that Lord Robert Cecil was right: “The process of oblivion sets in” quickly, and later generations cannot remember why it was so supremely important to create an organization to prevent further great-power wars. Besides, the UN isn’t really all that widely disdained.
It gets a bad press in the United States, but that is mainly because it acts as a brake on the untrammeled exercise of American military power. It’s still quite popular in most of the world, although it continues to annoy nationalists in all the great powers — and at the other extreme, it frustrates and infuriates all the idealists who want it to be about justice and democracy and maybe even brotherly love. It’s not. As Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican senator and ambassador to the United Nations, said in 1955: “This organization is created to keep you from going to Hell. It isn’t created to take you to Heaven.” For all the fine words of the Charter, the UN is still mainly about preventing another major war between the great powers (and as many other wars as possible).
Does the United Nations need to be “reformed”? Certainly. It has acquired some bad habits, and its structures have not kept up with the realities of a rapidly changing world. The current main focus of reformers is on the Security Council, whose permanent, veto-wielding members are still the five victorious great powers of 1945. Three-quarters of the countries that now comprise the UN were not even independent then, so clearly some adjustment is overdue.
However, the only imaginable solution is an expansion of the number of permanent members, because demoting any of the existing permanent members is unthinkable (and would simply be vetoed). But then come the questions — how many new members, and which ones, and do they get vetoes too? — so reform may not happen soon.
Is the UN still more or less functional the way it is? Yes. Its various specialized agencies, from the World Health Organization to UNESCO, do much good work, and its core, the Security Council, is there for when it’s needed. Most of the time it is not — but when a crisis hits, it still usually manages to rise to the occasion. It has done particularly well in the last few years, bending its own rules to support a decisive US response to terrorism in Afghanistan, but then withstanding enormous pressure to do the same over the Bush administration’s misbegotten invasion of Iraq. The United Nations is an attempt to change the way that international politics works, because the only alternative was to accept perpetual war, and by 1945 that was no longer an acceptable option. But not even the optimists imagined that it could succeed in less than a century or so.
Sixty years on, it may not yet be even halfway to its goal. No need to despair. As its most influential secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, used to say: “None of us are ever going to see the world order we dream of appear in our lifetime. Nevertheless, the effort to build that order is the difference between anarchy and a tolerable degree of chaos.”
