In his 2006 book, After The Neocons, Francis Fukuyama asserted that the world does ‘not want to replace national sovereignty with unaccountable international organisations – the United Nations is not now, nor will it ever become, an effective legitimate seat of global governance’. While it is arguable that the UN cannot be regarded as a supranational body capable of ruling the anarchic collection of world states, the reader should not infer from Fukuyama’s statement that the UN serves no purpose in the conducting of international relations. Indeed, the question here presupposes a ‘usefulness’ sometime in the past which may or may not now have been ‘outlived’. This essay will argue that while it does suffer from a number of failings, the UN has contributed to global stability over the past 65 years. It will proceed by accounting for the organisation’s role across diverse areas of activity – military, juridical and humanitarian – and it will conclude that in a rapidly globalising world the UN continues to be of substantial and far-reaching ‘use’. But before assessing this ‘usefulness’, it is first important to locate the UN in a historical context.
Foremost among the considerations of those framing the UN Charter in 1945 was the need to avoid the mistakes of the UN’s forerunner, the League of Nations. That organisation suffered from numerous flaws. Firstly it was integrated with the Peace Treaty of 1919, which was perceived by those who came off worst from it – Germany and Japan in particular – as being unfair. Secondly, it was largely toothless. America refused to join, thereby severely limiting its power to act in disputes. Thirdly, its aims were undefined – deciding a case of ‘aggression’ being one of the major areas of vagueness. Fourthly, it was too Euro-centric and fifthly, it lacked conviction. The idea of collective security – ‘one for all and all for one’ – was all well and good, but as Quintin Hogg said: ‘It is right to fight for one’s own king and country, but it is against nature to die for someone else’s.’ Taken together, this litany of shortcomings must lead the observer to view the League as nothing short of disastrous. Indeed, the liberal internationalist ideology behind it is belittled as ‘utopianism’ by EH Carr in The Twenty Years Crisis. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr fuelled the debate further in the 1930s by arguing that it was unrealistic to think man’s natural drives of acquisitiveness and aggression could be harnessed to the goal of international peace and understanding in bodies such as the League of Nations. So how did the nascent UN avoid falling into these same traps and so make itself more viable than the League?
For a start it had more members, 51 at first – including the US and Soviet Union; it wasn’t tied to a peace treaty; it had greater powers to act (denying the veto to all but the five permanent members of the Security Council) and it worked to a far broader agenda, encompassing economic and social concerns. This is not to say that as it developed the UN did not suffer setbacks. For more than 40 years it was severely constrained by the Cold War. Many conflicts which overlapped with the interests of either Washington or Moscow were not even deliberated by the UN. However, because of this the UN developed its peacekeeping role so that the superpowers would not themselves have to intervene in conflicts which might then escalate into full-blown war between them. The UN has also often been hesitant to step in to civil conflicts because of its respect for national sovereignty. Failure to restore order in Somalia in the early 1990s made the US and other leading members reluctant to commit forces quickly in other such conflict zones as Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. Question marks, too, hang over the behaviour of UN forces operating in, for example, the Congo and of the UN’s management of sanctions against Baghdad before the Second Gulf War. Rope in the bloated bureaucracy of the secretariat and claims of corruption and nepotism, and the list of failings starts to look as damning as those of the League. But before concluding that the UN has outlived its usefulness, a rule must be run over its undoubted successes.
Chief among these is the maintenance of some semblance of global peace. At first, this was mainly done by interposing troops between belligerents, as in 1956 when Anglo-French forces retreated from Egypt and UN troops were employed to keep Israeli and Egyptian forces apart. By the 1980s and the thawing of the Cold War, the superpowers began to sponsor UN operations such as;
i) Monitoring ceasefire lines on the Iran-Iraq border and Afghanistan;
ii) Disarming insurgents in Nicaragua and El Salvador;
iii) Clearing mines in Cambodia and Angola;
iv) Supervising elections in Cambodia and Namibia;
v) Securing humanitarian aid in Bosnia;
vi) Protecting enclaves in Iraq and Serbia.
And despite not sanctioning the US war on Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration was still keen to persuade the UN to establish a strong presence in the country when American forces became bogged down.
Aside from military considerations, the UN has roles to play in improving the situations of populations in the LDCs of the Global South. Through agencies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN is raising political consciousness of the plight of the poor, underfed, persecuted and dispossessed. Critics point out that the wealth gap between rich and poor has actually increased since 1945. But the question must be asked: how much wider would the gap have been without the UN? On a legal front, critics such as Eric Posner of Chicago University argue that the International Court of Justice is rarely used and frequently ignored while the UN’s International Treaty on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) is unpopular and hears few cases. In riposte, Oona Hathaway of Yale points out that ITLOS is still in its formative years while the ICJ has a ‘stunningly good’ record of compliance.
Clearly, the UN has a patchy record and cannot be regarded as entirely successful. Much of its work could be carried out by regional organisations such as the EU, ASEAN and NATO, with the probable removal of layers of bureaucracy and expense. Fukuyama argues that the UN is an obstacle to clear thinking about global governance and international institutions. He cites the Iraq war as highlighting its shortcomings: the UN was not able either to ratify the US decision to go to war or stop Washington from acting on its own, so either way it failed. Fukuyama also questions the UN’s very legitimacy as it makes no demands on its members to be democratic or respect the human rights of its citizens. He concludes that creating new, more effective international institutions will be a major challenge for the coming generation.
But lest we forget, the UN in its current manifestation does much to highlight the plight of the poor and powerless and has a crucial role to play in humanitarian responses to such disasters as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and the Haitian earthquake of 2010. It has a creditable record on peacekeeping and maintenance of the law in areas as diverse as war crimes and laws of the sea. But perhaps most importantly, it counts 192 states as members and must still be seen as a crucial forum for the resolution of disputes and antagonisms. Far from prefect it may be, but despite Fukuyama’s protestations, the UN is the nearest thing we have to a global government. And the question must be posed: would the world feel a more secure place to live if it did not exist? This essay answers ‘no’ and therefore concludes that the UN has not outlived its usefulness.
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