DISCUSSION 7B:  PAST AND FUTURE OF THE UNITED NATIONS

INTRODUCTION

In September 2002, against the backdrop of the developing stand-off in Iraq, George Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly in New York.  "All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment," he declared.  "Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"

Some sixty years, a previous American President, Franklin Roosevelt, had met British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to lay the foundation for a post-war international organization that might prove move successful than the ineffectual League of Nations.  The U.N. came into existence on October 24, 1945 after the founding charter, which talked about how negotiation and collective security might help to eliminate the "scourge of war," was ratified by the five major victors of World War II and permanent members of the new Security Council: the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.

The second Secretary General, the Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarkjold, a man who himself died on a peacekeeping mission, said the purpose of the United Nations was not to take mankind to paradise but rather to save humanity from hell.  During the decades after World War II the blue-helmeted soldiers of the U.N. participated in a number of actions, including Korea and the Congo, and gained considerable moral credibility.  Because both the Soviets and the Americans wielded the veto, however, the effectiveness of the organization during the Cold War years proved limited.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 sparked dreams of a more activist United Nations.  And, indeed, of the fifty-three peacekeeping missions between 1948 and 2000, forty of those took place after 1988.  At one point, 80,000 U.N. troops were involved in seventeen separate operations.  In 1998, several nations signed a treaty to establish an International Criminal Court.

The Post-Cold War era nonetheless brought considerable uncertainty.  U.N. soldiers no longer found themselves patrolling buffer zones between conventional armies that had fought themselves to a standstill but were instead cast into unstable guerrilla wars with unpredictable combatants.  The relationship between the United Nations and the world's dominant power, the United States, also became increasingly problematic.  In the 1993 Somalia operation, the lines of authority between U.N. and American forces proved divisive.  The next year, in Rwanda, a small U.N. mission failed to prevent the mass killing of 800,000 Tutsis.  Then, in 1995, Dutch troops stood by in the supposed U.N. "safe haven" of Srebrenica as Serb forces executed thousands of unarmed Bosnian Muslim males.  When military action was taken against the Serbs in Kosovo in 1999, it came under a NATO aegis without U.N. approval.  The failure of the Security Council to either authorize or prevent war against Iraq in 2003 further tested the credibility of the international organization.

READING ASSIGNMENT

REQUIRED READING:

OPTIONAL READING:

Web-Sites

News Articles

THE DISCUSSION FORUM

PRIMARY QUESTION:  Does the United Nations still matter?

SECONDARY QUESTIONS:  Is collective security and a functioning international system possible in a world dominated by one "hyper-power?"  What should be the main purposes of the U.N.?

 

 

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