On this day 78 years ago, the charter for the United Nations [UN] came into force.
The UN can be seen as a sequel to the League of Nations, which was created in 1920 in the wake of World War I with the purpose of guaranteeing peace, something it failed to do on several notable occasions before it finally shut up shop in 1939 when the outbreak of World War II demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt the organisation’s essential ineffectiveness.
The UN’s creators perhaps had the League’s ignominious failure in mind when they stated its primary purpose was to prevent another world war.
And to be fair, so far so good.
Although the UN’s efforts have not saved “succeeding generations from the scourge of war” [there have been more than 250 armed conflicts since its charter was ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other signatories on October 25, 1945], there hasn’t been another all-encompassing global conflagration since the advent of the vast intergovernmental organisation.
Not that this necessarily proves the UN’s efficacy, of course – the MAD [mutually assured destruction] promise of nuclear Armageddon has surely been a more effective deterrent against the start of another world war than any number of resolutions [it’s obviously not coincidental that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council can wield nuclear warheads as well as vetoes].
Still, there is a strong argument to be made that the UN’s peacekeeping force, which peaked at 130,000 in 2014 and currently sits at about 87,000, has at least been able to help return a number of conflict-riven countries to a semblance of stability, as well as preserve a number of ceasefires in various global hotspots.
And there are other functions the UN undertakes – including delivering humanitarian aid, promoting sustainable development, and upholding international law – with varying degrees of success.
There are also a number of criticisms about how it operates, including include moral relativism [the claim that, as the UN’s membership has grown, it has become increasingly amenable to the requirements of dictatorships, due to “free democracies” now representing a minority of member states], and the allegation the organisation’s promotion of globalism threatens countries’ sovereignty [for example, the global pandemic treaty currently being discussed is decried in some quarters as potentially allowing UN agency the World Health Organisation to usurp countries’ individual ability to make decisions in the event of another worldwide outbreak].
There’s also been an ongoing complaint [not without merit] that the UN’s Human Rights Council has a disproportionate focus on allegations of abuses by Israel compared to alleged violations in places such as China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Zimbabwe.
All in all, it’s difficult to emphatically state the world is better off for the fact of the UN’s existence, such are its myriad imperfections.
But then, what can we really expect? Just as American playwright and increasingly conservative curmudgeon David Mamet has observed of the United States legal system, the UN “can only be an agglomeration of human beings. That is, the foolish, the misguided, the self-interested, the careerist, and the idealist — the same admixture found in you and me.”
