United Nations Has the United

United Nations

Has the United Nations been Successful in Furthering World Peace?

The primary purpose of the United Nations, as outlined in its charter, is to maintain world peace. The idea is that by providing a forum for countries to discuss and settle their disputes peacefully, the organization would indirectly help its member countries to develop and prosper. But has the United Nations been successful in furthering world peace since its formation after the Second World War? The fact that the world has seen countless wars all over the globe during the last half century, most of them involving UN member countries; witnessed a number of horrible genocides and ethnic cleansings in which millions of people were brutally killed, and tolerated vicious dictators who have trampled human rights with impunity, forces one to conclude that the UN has failed abysmally in its primary objective. This essay traces the long and regrettable story of the United Nations' failure in furthering world peace, explains the reasons for its failure and makes suggestions for improvement.

Before judging the performance of the United States too harshly, it must be remembered that maintaining peace between warring factions has never been an easy task in the past history of mankind. The concept of "perpetual peace," promised by a number of philosophers and religions since the ancient times, has always remained an unfulfilled dream. The Book of Isaiah (one of the books of the Old Testament), for instance, prophesizes perpetual peace at sometime in the future by stating: "they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more" (Isaiah, Chapter 2, Verse 4), but such an utopian future is yet to arrive. Ancient empires such as the Roman Empire also declared their intention to enforce peace foreever, but no empire has ever ruled the entire world nor did they last forever; hence the concept of world peace always remained an illusive theory. In modern times, Immanuel Kant wrote a famous essay in 1795 titled "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch" in which he presented the notion of a peaceful community of nations (Kant). The idea was picked up by the American President, Woodrow Wilson during the First War who floated the proposal to set up the League of Nations -- the forerunner of the United Nations. In fact the objectives of the League were almost exactly the same as that of the UN, i.e., to achieve disarmament, prevent war, settle disputes through diplomacy, and improve global welfare. As is well-known, the League failed miserably to achieve its goals as the world was plunged into an even more devastating conflict within two decades of the end of the First World War.

One major difference between the League of Nations and the United Nations was that a major world power -- the United States -- did not join the League due to opposition by the U.S. Senate. The United Nations, on the other hand, was joined by all the major world powers at the end of the Second World War including the United States and the Soviet Union. Hence the UN was a more powerful organization than the League and people justifiably had higher expectations from it. However, the Cold War conflict between the two major powers of the post-War era became the major impediment in the way of its effectiveness. This was mainly due to the zero-sum nature of the Cold War in which almost every move of the organization was hamstrung by extreme polarization between the pro-American and the pro-Soviet countries. (Holmes, 323)

Moreover, the very structure of the United Nations was such that it almost guaranteed paralysis. UN Security Council was the organ that was entrusted with the task of maintaining peace and security among nations. Its five permanent members -- the U.S., USSR, Britain, France, China -- were given veto powers, which enabled them to void any Security Council resolution irrespective of the extent of general support on any issue. Such powers, especially in the Cold War environment, meant that the two major adversarial powers for the first forty years of the United Nation's existence would never let a UN resolution pass, which was perceived to be against their respective strategic interest.

After the end of the Cold War in 1990, there was renewed optimism that the UN could play a greater role in resolving conflicts and promoting peace around the world. Unfortunately, except for a few notable exceptions, the hope for a more effective role of the UN has remained largely unfulfilled. A major reason for the continued ineffectiveness of the United Nations is the desire of the United States as the sole superpower and the major contributor to the UN budget to impose its will on the organization. In recent years, the U.S. policy in the UN has been to use it as an instrument of its foreign policy interests and to ignore or even undermine its authority when it fails to toe its line. This was amply demonstrated during the United States' unilateral decision to invade Iraq despite failing to get a resolution passed in the Security Council to do so. The U.S. disdain for the UN was also reflected in the Bush administration's appointment in August 2005 of John Bolton as its UN Ambassador; a man who was openly contemptuous of the UN and had once said: "The (U.N.) Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." (Quoted by Slavin and Nichols)