I say to my colleagues that you have to start from the fact that the United Nations is a mirror, a reflection of the world as it is, whether we like it or not. There are dictatorships, there are violations of human rights, there’s war and conflict, and yes, we must be realistic. But the United Nations is also a reflection of the world as it should be—the “We the peoples,” the principles and purpose of the Charter.
—Jan Eliasson, deputy secretary-general of the UN
The United Nations came into existence as a result of the most terrible war in history. During World War II, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and the leaders of other Allied combatant nations agreed that it was necessary to create a world organization that would help ensure the peace in future years. Their ideas are enshrined in the Preamble to the UN Charter:
We the peoples of the United Nations determined
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
and for these ends
to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and
to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,
have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims
Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.
When the war ended in 1945, the new organization began with enormous goodwill, moral support from all sides, and strong US leadership. The world waited to see if the UN could rectify the shortcomings of the League of Nations, its predecessor organization, which dissolved in the late 1930s, victim of totalitarian regimes and US indifference. Could the UN be the uniting force among the victorious nations, whose ideologies and political interests often seemed at odds? The Cold War soon replaced idealistic collaboration with power politics between the West and the East. Until the breakup of the Soviet Union, confrontation between the blocs defined most UN relationships, discussions, debates, programs, and activities.
“We the peoples,” from a poster about the UN Charter. UN Photo / Milton Grant.
Today, although Americans do not expect the UN to solve the world’s problems, at the least they would like it to be a more effective agent in dealing with the forces that are transforming our world. Exactly what these forces are, and how they are changing our lives, is hotly debated and discussed. What we can say with certainty is that the forces of change will need to be addressed by living, breathing people, not computer software or mechanical robots. The UN is, above all, a place for people and a hotbed of the human factor. As one of my UN insiders says, people really do matter at the UN, and they act in a context full of illusion, opinion, perception, and emotion. But the UN is far from simple. It straddles the globe, operating in almost every nation on earth, and it has a bewildering variety of offices, programs, and personnel. Let’s begin, then, with some basic points and language that will appear throughout the book.
As the Preamble of the Charter declares, the world’s peoples, acting through their representatives, seek to create a peaceful, just, and prosperous world through common action. But exactly what is the nature of this common effort? For one thing, it is not a form of “world government,” as some may think. Although the UN’s fundamental document, the Charter, begins with the words “We the peoples,” the organization’s members are sovereign nations, 193 of them, not individual people. It is these member states that appoint the executives who direct the organization, and it is the member states that pay most of the costs. Furthermore, the UN does not maintain a military establishment, it has no troops of its own, and it can impose its will on nations only in rare and unusual circumstances, when great powers like the United States are prepared to back up the UN’s decisions with their own military and political might.
The UN’s special character is not always well understood. The late US diplomat Richard Holbrooke used to tell a story about a speaking engagement in Odessa, Texas, when “some guy asked, ‘What do you think about this world government thing?’ I said there was no such thing, and he said, ‘What about the UN, that’s a world government, they are trying to take away our liberties.’ And I said, ‘Well, sir, that is just not true.’ There are people out there who think the UN has that kind of power and insidious influence, and the truth is the exact opposite: the UN is too weak, not too strong. You start with a certain percentage of people completely misunderstanding the UN, criticizing it from the wrong point of view. ‘Too strong’ is their fear when in fact ‘too weak’ to be effective is the truth.”
As we will see throughout the book, the UN has many parts, many facets, each of which can offer a particular feel of the world body. Nancy Soderberg, a US diplomat at the UN in the Clinton years, goes so far as to claim, “There is no such single thing as the UN.” Rather, the UN “is 193 countries with different agendas and a whole collection of civil servants who work there, and it’s all Jell-O. You can’t say what the UN is because you touch one area and it comes out looking differently on the other side.” John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN under President George W. Bush, adds that people have a hard time understanding the organization because “they don’t know what the different pieces do, and some of the humanitarian agencies, which do work well, get lost in the shuffle.”
Nevertheless, the UN can be described in relatively few words. Jeffrey Laurenti, formerly at the Century Foundation, defines the organization as a “supra-political association incorporating all governments and drawing on their political authority. It is a weak membrane in terms of decision making and implementation but is nonetheless a political expression of a global sense of purpose and shared interests. The UN speaks to the aspirations of humankind. It commands public attention in most of the world as a place where world public opinion is developed and voiced and where global policy gets hammered out.”
To gain a better sense of this unique global entity, let’s begin with its organizational structure, which will introduce us to key elements that will appear repeatedly in the following chapters.
The accompanying flowchart lays out the basic structures and entities. Along the left side are the six principal organs, some of which are household names: the General Assembly (which consists of delegates from all member nations of the UN), the Security Council (in which five permanent member states have the right to veto any resolution they don’t like), the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Secretariat (which is the UN’s executive body), the International Court of Justice (ICJ, better known as the World Court), and the Trusteeship Council (which did its job so well it has lost its reason for being). With the exception of ECOSOC and the Trusteeship Council, these principal organs get considerable media coverage and are, in some ways, the most significant movers and shakers within the UN.
When we move to the right on the chart, the scene gets more complicated. Here we find a varied collection of entities and organizations, some of which are older than the UN itself and operate with almost complete independence from it. Best known to the public are the “Specialized Agencies,” such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Another group, here called “Funds and Programmes,” includes one very well known body, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and several others that appear frequently in the news, like the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP, which monitors climate change and other environmental issues) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It also contains a new entity, UN Women, established by the General Assembly in 2010, which merges the resources and roles of four predecessor bodies, the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women (OSAGI), and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). We will examine UN Women later in the book.
To the left of the funds and programs on the chart are the “Subsidiary Bodies,” featuring one standout, the Human Rights Council, which meets in Geneva and receives heavy press coverage. An arrow shows that these bodies report to the General Assembly. Below these subsidiary bodies are additional ones, including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). All of these report to the Security Council, as the arrow shows.
Moving directly to the far right, we find “Related Organizations,” containing such high-profile entities as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). They report to the General Assembly. Below them on the chart are the “Specialized Agencies,” noted earlier, which report to ECOSOC. Some, like the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), remain little known despite their vital importance to the smooth functioning of our daily lives. Many run their own affairs with little interference and, as critics have complained, without much communication with the peer agencies, programs, or commissions with which they share interests.
Going to the chart’s left side, not quite at the bottom, we find a grab bag of entities. The “Functional Commissions” include some that on first glance seem to poach on the ground of other entities. For example, the Commission on the Status of Women seems to overlap UN Women, listed under “Funds and Programmes.” The overlap is more apparent than real, however, because the functional commissions concentrate on policy, while the funds and programs are oriented more toward implementation. “Regional Commissions,” also listed here, are among the least known of UN bodies. They address economic development in the regions of Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, and Western Asia. The “Other Bodies” listed here deal mainly with issues of civil society, public administration, and other matters important to developing nations.
The UN system. UN Department of Public Information, August 2013.
Running across the bottom of the chart is a list of “Departments and Offices,” encompassing the departments of the UN Secretariat (which is overseen by the secretary-general, currently Mr. Ban Ki-moon).
We now have a good schematic picture of the UN’s structure. But this is only a beginning. When we think about the organization in action, flowcharts aren’t very helpful, because they don’t show how the parts interact or how effective or efficient they are. They don’t show, for example, that regional blocs control most of the votes in the main deliberative body, the General Assembly. The blocs are invisible yet powerful actors on the UN stage.
The fact that the UN is overseen by 193 member states, often with varying agendas, can contribute to a degree of administrative waffling and diplomatic theatrics. Brian Urquhart, who participated in creating the UN, argues, however, that the shortcomings have to be balanced against the strengths. “There’s quiet diplomacy, which goes on twenty-four hours a day,” he says. “There’s the secretary-general and the Secretariat, who, contrary to general belief, are rather effective and not, incidentally, a great bloated organization. … The UN is not very efficient, I have to say, in some respects, because it’s recruited from all over the world, and you have to work hard to get a common standard going, but it does work.” He concludes, “The UN is like an insurance policy: you hate paying for it, but it’s useful if something goes wrong.”
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon emphasizes the unique position of the UN as an honest broker. “At the United Nations we have great convening power to find global solutions to our global problems.” And problems there surely are, from terrorism and nuclear proliferation to worldwide hunger and disease. These threats “cannot be approached as items on a list,” says the secretary-general. “The trick is to see them as part of a broader whole. In truth, solutions to one are solutions to all. The key is to see the interconnections among all the problems that come to our door at the UN.”
Putting aside international diplomacy, why should Americans care about the UN? Pressed to identify a specific UN-related item or service they have encountered recently, people might mention UNICEF trick-or-treat boxes and holiday cards. But is that all?
The UN sets standards that affect us every day. “You may think that you have never benefited personally from the UN,” says former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, “but if you have ever traveled on an international airline or shipping line or placed a phone call overseas or received mail from outside the country or been thankful for an accurate weather report—then you have been served directly or indirectly by one part or another of the UN system.” Zalmay Khalilzad, who was US ambassador to the UN under President George W. Bush, notes that for a global power like the United States, the world body is a very important instrument that should be made as effective as possible and “reformed as we go forward so that it can maintain the confidence of people and countries around the world.”
The central role of the United States in creating and supporting the UN gives it a special place in UN affairs and has led many insiders to remark on the close and sometimes contentious relationship between the two entities. “The United Nations has no better friend than America,” declares Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Arguing from national polls, he says that “most Americans want US foreign policy to be conducted in partnership with the UN. They understand that working together is in the best interest of the United States, the United Nations, and, most importantly, the peoples of the world.”
An eminent diplomat who served under the Clinton administration as US ambassador to the UN from 1999 to 2001 offered a parallel analysis. “I need to underscore repeatedly that the UN is only as good as the US commitment,” said Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the Dayton Accords ending the war in Bosnia in 1995. “The UN cannot succeed if the US does not support it.”
Another UN insider, speaking from a very different background, agrees with Holbrooke’s assessment. Mark Malloch-Brown spent many years running one of the UN’s major agencies before becoming the deputy secretary-general during the last year of Kofi Annan’s tenure as secretary-general. From this perch Malloch-Brown gained a deep appreciation of the importance of the United States in almost all aspects of the UN’s work. “You can’t have an effective UN without very strong American engagement in the organization,” he says. “The US has to be there in a strong leadership role.”
The US domestic political establishment includes experts and advisers who favor a more go-it-alone foreign policy, and for them the UN sometimes seems a greater hindrance than help. The dominant view, however, has been for the US government to cooperate with and enable the UN as much as possible, as long as it doesn’t threaten fundamental American interests. Esther Brimmer, a former assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs who is now on the faculty of the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, emphasizes the value of the UN for conducting diplomacy and addressing pressing issues. “For the United States, the United Nations is an important foreign-policy tool. The UN’s system has important mechanisms, institutions where you can actually get things done. And for certain issues, when you need to have global reach, you need to work with different parts of the UN system depending on what the topic is.” She explains the concept of the diplomatic toolkit. “The toolkit is a phrase you’ll hear used a lot because that’s how many US policymakers think about what they’re trying to do. What tools do I have to use to accomplish this objective? One of the important ones might be alliances, it might be other relationships, it might be public partnerships. Another one is working within the UN system.”
President Barack Obama is on record as saying that “no country has a greater stake in a strong United Nations than the United States. The United States benefits from a global institution intended to advance the rule of law, the peaceful resolution of disputes, effective collective security, humanitarian relief, development, and respect for human rights.”
Madeleine Albright argues that the United States does not have the choice of acting “only through the UN or only alone.” Rather, she says, “we want—and need—both options. So in diplomacy, an instrument like the UN will be useful in some situations, useless in others, and extremely valuable in getting the whole job done.” The UN can help make the world a better place, she continues, and this is to our advantage because we know that “desperation is a parent to violence, that democratic principles are often among the victims of poverty, and that lawlessness is a contagious disease.” Albright concluded: “We cannot be the world’s policemen, though we’re very good at it.”
