The United Nations is a complex organization consisting of many rather autonomous parts with distinct substantive mandates. See figure 0.2 for an overview of the UN System. It is a dynamic group of actors that have evolved over time with respect to both worldwide reputation and operational balance sheet of achievements and disappointments. Sometimes, the UN shows the world how important it has become, as it did during the COVID-19 pandemic when the moral authority of the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, rose above the partisan clamors and nationalist behavior of the leaders of sovereign states.
As well, the world public came to realize during the pandemic that the UN is more than the Security Council and General Assembly. It understood the crucial role played by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a source of reliable and objective information, guidance, authority, and material assistance, which was invaluable for the least developed countries throughout the health crisis. The WHO also was generally regarded as a trustworthy framework for considering issues of global concern from the perspective of human interests. In this regard, it is illuminating that the coronavirus disease became designated a “pandemic” rather than a challenging epidemic only when the WHO declared it to be such on March 11, 2020.
Yet even in this moment of internationalist recognition and dependence, there was a pushback, expressed by the US government’s harsh criticism and defunding of the WHO. These measures of disapproval were followed shockingly by its temporary withdrawal from the WHO in the midst of the pandemic. These clumsy, vindictive, self-destructive policies of the Trump presidency seemed partly intended to shift blame away from the deplorable initial responses to the health challenge by the political leadership in the United States. It was one of the most irresponsible geopolitical temper tantrums of all time, second only to the reckless temerity of blaming this lethal disease altogether on China, which is not to deny the unacceptable Chinese handling of the outbreak of the disease in Wuhan in late 2019. Failures of states to cooperate in response to the pandemic in a manner sensitive to the global scope of the crisis and the disparities in coping mechanisms among sovereign states increased the suffering attributable to the disease. It is also an important reminder of the need for states to reimagine their national interests as they relate to the United Nations, as well as to recognize the imperatives of cooperation to address collective goods problems of global scope.
Overall, the UN has had ups and downs during its more than seventy-five years of existence. As mentioned, when an international crisis exists that affects the well-being of humanity as distinct from specific countries, the UN is often the last best hope for a collective response that enjoys support worldwide, but even here the organization has often disappointed its most ardent supporters, including failures at the level of action. This happened during the coronavirus pandemic and to a less clear extent in fashioning a robust cooperative approach to the threats posed by climate change, an effort that did lead to the widely heralded Paris Climate Change Agreement of 2015. Yet at other times, the marginality of the UN while violence rages, famines threaten, and genocidal onslaughts occur leads many persons, as well as media commentary and governmental policy to dismiss the UN as an indispensable actor when it comes to addressing the biggest challenges of world. We regard such dismissal as unfair and as inaccurate as uncritical endorsement of the UN in spite of its mixed record.
The UN from its inception was not given the authority to address situations internal to sovereign states and was assigned no direct responsibility for world order challenges of global scope such as population pressures, planetary pollution, and migration trends. Its security writ was limited to the international sphere of interaction among states, although as globalizing effects became problematic and interdependence more pronounced, the lines separating national, international, and global concerns seemed to become unavoidably blurred.
In this regard disappointing results happened throughout the internal long war in Syria (2011–21), during which more than 500,000 civilians were killed in the country, millions more displaced internally and regionally, several ancient cities devastated, and international crimes frequently occurred. The UN failed to stop the violence or halt reliance on criminal tactics. Such dramas of inaction occur whenever there exists a political impasse at the geopolitical level of world politics on a vital matter, most evident in UN settings when the five permanent members of the Security Council (P5) are split, which was the case with respect to Syria when the P5 members intervened on opposite sides. Sometimes when geopolitical actors agree on policy, effective action is possible under UN auspices, as happened in authorizing the Gulf War of 1991 in response to Iraqi aggression against Kuwait.
Even during the Cold War years, the rival superpowers and their allies sometimes did manage to act together, most notably with respect to crisis management of the risks posed by the dangers of nuclear war. In this spirit, the United States and the Soviet Union issued an important joint statement in 1985: “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Unfortunately, the war planners and weapons labs in both countries continued the search for superior nuclear weapons and war plans that sought victory rather than settling for a permanent strategic stalemate.1
Less prominent inaction, although also disturbing, is UN inaction in those circumstances where human ordeal is not linked closely enough to strategic interests to generate the political will to commit resources, and possibly lives, to stopping massive suffering in what is perceived to be a geopolitically marginal context. Typical geopolitical evasions are expressed by the realist meme “we have no dog in this fight” and applied to bloodshed in the Balkans or by a presidential decree forbidding US bureaucrats from using the word genocide to describe the obviously “genocidal” massacres that took place in Rwanda in 1994. The prohibition was imposed to lessen humanitarian pressures within and outside the US government to act, whether on its own or through the UN, to stop the killing.2
At other times, geopolitical forces suspend disagreements to facilitate a consensus on action that produces chaos rather than bringing peace. In such circumstances the UN can become an instrument of the very war-making it was established to prevent. This happened in 2011 when the Security Council compromised, authorizing a limited humanitarian use of force in Libya to protect the civilian population of Benghazi from an alleged threat of genocide by government forces.3 When it came to implementation, NATO, the UN’s delegated agent of enforcement, pursued an unauthorized regime-changing course of action. This was a clear expansion of the Security Council mandate and a violation of trust by the several states persuaded to abstain because of the strictly limited mission authorized by the UN Security Council resolution. Maintaining an atmosphere of trust among geopolitical rivals at the UN, especially within the Security Council in situations where a use of force is authorized, may be as important for UN legitimacy and effectiveness as it is to seek political compromises or find common ground between parties to a conflict.
The UN’s public image suffered, especially in the Global South, from the failure of the political organs of the UN to challenge punitive national and international sanctions imposed on Iran and Venezuela during the ravages of the 2020 pandemic. In this sense, as much as we believe that the world needs a more empowered and respected UN, it is important to recognize that up to the present there have been some occasions and issues on which the UN has responded admirably, but more often it has not been able to fulfill the core Charter goal of war prevention.
The UN as presently constituted cannot be expected to do any better than what these geopolitical actors permit or undertake themselves. It is clarifying to appreciate that such geopolitical limitations on UN authority resulted from deliberate and fundamental features of the original design of the UN. This design is expressed through voting rules applicable at the Security Council and in relation to a variety of Charter provisions, including the selection of the Secretary-General, amendments to the Charter, and convening a conference of the membership devoted to global reform. It seems that wartime cooperation during the struggle against fascism in Europe and imperialism in Asia misled the public, and even the founders of the UN, as to what to expect from the new organization. This wartime optimism vanished soon after the Allies achieved victory. Only fears of World War III and worries about the recurrence of the Great Depression induced moderation of conflictual impulses. The UN was born and evolved through the decades in such an adversary atmosphere.
It is useful to think of three different initial dimensions of the UN System: institutional/organizational, structural, and operational.4 Roughly distinguished, the institutional/organizational dimension is descriptive of the many distinct platforms and organizational arrangements that together make up what has come to be called “the UN System,” drawing a primary distinction between “political organs” and “specialized agencies, funds, and programmes”; the structural dimension is concerned with the constitutional arrangements that distribute functions and roles to the systemic units, but also specifies how states become members and how members participate, with attention to the tensions between “sovereign rights,” “geopolitical autonomy,” and “UN authority”; the operational dimension is descriptive of the practice of the UN in a wide array of situations over the course of UN history and how that practice reflects and alters expectations associated with structure and policy outcomes.
The public understanding of the UN then and now is overwhelmingly focused on the central war prevention undertaking set forth in the Preamble to the Charter, yet as we shall show this is a misleading form of reductionism with respect to an appraisal of the significance of the UN and what it would mean for the political well-being of the world’s people if the UN did not exist or were to disappear. The management of the world economy was always given a substantive importance approaching that accorded the war/peace agenda, but for a variety of reasons, it was largely assigned a different organizational track, referred to as “the Bretton Woods Institutions,” especially the World Bank and IMF (and the later World Trade Organization organizationally situated outside the UN System). The managerial challenges associated with the world economy gave rise as well to the less formally structured frameworks operating outside the UN, becoming known as the Group of Seven (G7) and Group of Twenty (G20). These policy platforms outside the UN were further complemented by private sector and civil society organizations, most significantly the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic Forum, and the World Social Forum.
The governing elites of leading capitalist countries after World War II had worries that the Great Depression of the 1930s would recur unless the world economy was better managed. In contrast were initiatives arising from Global South concerns that the promotion of profits and plunder by corporate and financial influence would continue to shape the world economy. These institutions also developed structures and procedures pertaining to funding and weighted voting, exhibiting the hierarchy of influence among market economies.
There is less awareness in the media and public opinion about what was well understood by UN founders—to wit, that world peace depended on more than prohibiting force, that it required a less dramatic set of undertakings, especially considering the diversities of states that made up UN membership, such as their differing priorities, civilizational identities, and resource endowments. This meant that if the UN was to succeed, it had to promote creative linkages among peace, security, and development, as well as deal with the peacetime challenges of health, employment, education, culture, law, and human rights in a functional manner that was as far removed from geopolitical tensions as possible.
This turn toward “realism” can be seen differently and more ambiguously. The veto was the main nonnegotiable price paid for vital assurances of Great Power membership and participation. It likely explains the perseverance of the UN despite many stressful periods as a global actor and the somewhat surprising fact that almost every state, large or small, maintained its membership and took advantage of its participation through good times and bad, an experience contrasting with the League of Nation’s loss of participation by Great Powers. This is part of the reason why the hopes surrounding the establishment of the League were doomed from the start.
Another line of explanation for burdening the UN with the P5 veto was to accommodate the Soviet Union, whose leader made clear that Soviet participation in an organization with a Euro-American voting majority was dependent on assurances that the UN would lack the capability to override the strategic interests of the P5. The veto has been used over the years by Western powers to avoid Charter constraints and UN majorities, but in 1945 its central role was to secure Soviet participation without which the whole undertaking would lack credibility from its inception.
Yet it is most uncertain whether the road not taken would have turned out better. The League of Nations experience suggests that if the Great Powers cannot control the game they will not play. At least the UN has created multiple games within its organizational architecture. Although the biggest games of all, the war game and the transnational economic game, have essentially remained subject to geopolitics beyond the regulatory reach of the UN or international law, multiple other games such as disaster relief, health, cultural heritage, and multilateral cooperation with regard to the global commons and the environment have engaged all states in generally mutually beneficial ways. Dramatic increases in interconnectedness, complexity, and transnational networking associated with digitization of communications and relationships, as well as shifts in the locus of political conflict, challenge the UN. To make the UN effective given these globalizing conditions presupposes a gradual empowerment of the UN to shrink the influence of geopolitics. Such adjustments are imperative if the UN is to satisfy the growing demand for globalized solutions to issues associated with armed conflict, economic development, ecological sustainability, and more broadly, human security.
As conditions changed, the organizational profile of the UN evolved in response. Sustainable development and human rights became more important, while upholding labor standards and promoting cultural life diminished in significance. These assessments are constantly changing as policy priorities shift in response to changing conditions. Although the hope had been to shield the specialized agencies of the UN System from political controversy, the ironies have been that important member states, especially the United States and Israel, have more often expressed their frustrations in relation to the UN Human Rights Council, UNRWA, UNFPA, UNESCO, and even WHO than to the Security Council and the General Assembly. Such displeasure is expressed verbally and, more tangibly, by withholding funding and suspending participation, at least for long enough to exhibit displeasure or to reflect the viewpoint of a particular national leadership.
As suggested above, changes in the global setting shift the spotlight of attention with respect to organizational relevance. Until the coronavirus pandemic struck the planet in 2020 as an invisible meteor, for the public the WHO was a relatively unknown UN specialized agency and inadequately appreciated even by health specialists a source of indispensable information, especially for the less developed countries. WHO also disseminated best practices pertaining to serious health challenges. Specialized agencies can become arenas of intense controversy when policy divergencies emerge in relation to internationally controversial issues, especially involving countries that are accustomed to being a law unto themselves. In this regard the functional approach to international relations that had hoped to create a system of apolitical problem-solving agencies relying on science and expert opinion to give the range of international institutions a set of capabilities that could perform without the distraction of political tensions of member states was badly hampered by disturbing trends toward the politicization of knowledge.
The structural character of the UN can be comprehended in two principal ways by the organizational chart (figure 0.2) that depicts the various components of the UN System. It also shows their relationships to the extent set forth in the constitutional framework provided by the UN Charter. Both organizationally and operationally the UN System has changed over time, reflecting an impressive ability to adapt to changed needs and take account of new knowledge about global dynamics, altering our understanding of coordination and cooperation and the distribution of authority within the UN, as for instance, among principal organs of the UN, such as the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Secretary-General, and the International Court of Justice.
In a crude sense, the Security Council is the UN decision-making body that gives overt weight to inequalities in status and capabilities among member states. When the P5 agree, the Security Council possesses almost unlimited potential authority. When the P5 disagree strongly, the Security Council is generally paralyzed, lacking the authority to even offer an opinion critical of Charter violations.
The General Assembly is more of a public forum that reflects the sovereign equality of all member states and provides an arena for non-Western countries, especially the developing world, to express their grievances and seek greater policy influence by the exercise of their recommendatory authority. In theory, if the Security Council fails to act in response to a situation threatening world peace, the Uniting for Peace resolution vests in the General Assembly a residual role at times of international emergencies to propose and authorize action to restore peace and security.5 In practice, the P5, despite their differences with one another, are hesitant to support a wider application of UN authority than is present in the UN Charter, which indirectly challenges their future control over the peace and security agenda. It is rarely commented upon, but retaining geopolitical prerogatives has seemed more important even to the NATO members of the P5 than empowering the General Assembly with residual authority to act.
The Secretary-General plays executive and administrative roles within the UN and can express political opinions on matters of global concern, especially as comments on unfolding global crises. The Secretary-General is elected to a five-year term, which can be renewed once for another five years, following a recommendation by the Security Council and a vote of the General Assembly.
Finally, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) provides the UN with the highest source of judicial authority on the world stage. The Court is available to resolve legal disputes among states, but without authority to take up cases unless the state parties give consent in advance or in relation to a particular dispute, which is rarely given. ICJ authority does not automatically produce compliance as governments do not consistently implement its decisions even after participating in the process, making enforcement a problem that is available to be called upon if a Security Council consensus so directs. Yet if this happens, dangerous friction may be the consequence.
The ICJ also has the capacity to respond to legal questions put to it by UN organs and agencies by rendering Advisory Opinions, which seem authoritative from a juridical standpoint but are not legally binding and have a poor record of engendering political respect. Advisory Opinions have added influential jurisprudential understanding of important contested issues in international life such as the legal status of nuclear weapons or of the Israeli separation wall in Occupied Palestine.6 These ICJ outcomes are important contributions within spheres of symbolic politics and often exert influence on civil society activism, but when it comes to altering the behavior of states or the UN itself, the results to date have been disappointing. By labeling ICJ responses to requests for Advisory Opinions as “advisory,” or non-obligatory, the Statute of the ICJ deliberately disempowers the UN from insisting on respect for international law by all its members, sending an unfortunate message to the world.
Part of the complexity of the UN is due to certain contradictory elements in its makeup and behavior. The Preamble conveys a grandiose picture of the role of the UN, but when we come to the Articles or provisions of the Charter that set forth the roles and functions of the main organs of the UN, we are confronted by the centrality of member states, as represented by national governments, in the functioning of the UN and the absence of any sense of representation or procedures for meaningful participation, much less transparency and accountability to the people of the world. A fundamental contradiction is present in the Charter between national sovereignty of states as the highest source of authority in the UN governance structure and respect for international law as overriding the political will of states. It suggests that the UN has an unacknowledged mandate to hold only the weak and less dangerous states accountable to the Charter and international law but fails to even make legal attempts to constrain the strongest and most dangerous states should they or their friends engage in aggressive warfare or other forms of unlawful behavior.
Although this feature of the UN helps explain its disappointing record with respect to constraining the behavior of the P5 and their close allies, it is an accommodation to the realities of a world order in which governance depends so heavily on the quality of geopolitical leadership. The formative ideas about the UN were that it needed to accommodate geopolitics and state sovereignty, while at the same time aspiring to universality to enhance its effectiveness and legitimacy through the inclusiveness of its membership.
Another major limitation of the UN resulted from the inconclusiveness and diminished legitimacy arising from the acceptance of European colonial arrangements, which in 1945 continued to disenfranchise and underrepresent many national societies in Asia and Africa. Their indirect representation via colonial authority deprived the UN of legitimacy in most of the non-Western world, but this was overcome by stages as anti-colonial struggles achieved a string of successes resulting in the replacement of colonies by independent states that were admitted to the UN. As the winds of change gained force, the UN itself renounced colonialism and sided with the struggles of colonized peoples for political independence, invoking their inalienable right of self-determination. It was one of the important unanticipated characteristics of the UN to demonstrate political flexibility by modifying its identity in ways to make good on the claim of representing the peoples of the world. Impressively, the UN managed to achieve these results despite Cold War tensions. The admission of former European colonies as new members had an impact, none greater than partially redirecting the energies of the UN to the development agenda. The later addition of environment protection to the list of primary UN concerns illustrated a different kind of adaptation to changed conditions of global significance. As earlier commented upon, despite the difficulty of formally amending its Charter, the UN was able to respond to changing world order challenges of a substantive nature, although limited in policy formation by clashing governmental interests.
What the UN was often unable to do was to make fundamental institutional adjustments. It has been unable to alter the composition of the Security Council and the size, composition, and prerogatives of the P5, which has stuck with the geopolitical landscape of 1945 rather than adapting to the redistribution of global power in the 2020s. The UN has been able to alter its institutional treatment of some issues, however. For example, it upgraded the Human Rights Commission to become the Human Rights Council with a higher status within the UN System, and it established the UN Environmental Program in response to rising concerns about carbon emissions, pollution, pesticides, and toxic waste.
Operational Considerations
As a political actor conducting a wide range of activities, the UN is at once a tightly regulated and constrained bureaucracy and an international force that can act without constraints or supervision if it has the political wind behind it. Often, the relevance of the UN has seemed to revolve around the personality of the Secretary-General, demonstrated especially through signs of willingness to resist geopolitical pressures and the exertion of leadership responsive to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. Bolder Secretaries-General sometimes paid the price by not being reelected or being sidelined, and in one instance, that of Dag Hammarskjold, being assassinated. It was Hammarskjold more than any other UN Secretary-General who demonstrated the potential for “innovation,” in peacekeeping contexts as ways to circumvent to some extent the political paralysis associated with Cold War tensions. Yet Hammarskjold was by no means just a tool useful for extending the Western worldview to peace and security concerns. His demise occurred due to his attempts to uphold the radical economic nationalism of the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. By and large, UN Secretaries-General have been creatures of the geopolitically shaped organization, deferential political figures who know what red lines not to cross so as to avoid antagonizing the UN’s most influential members, who hold the power of the purse and are adept at applying back-channel pressures.
UN peacekeeping operations as they evolved over the decades have often not been considered worthy of media or public attention even though they have effectively stabilized delicate ceasefires and volatile borders over long periods. For instance, the UN presence on the Lebanese-Israeli border has discouraged flare-ups in that highly sensitive part of the world, and the UN peacekeeping operation at the Pakistani-Indian border of Kashmir has prevented potentially dangerous confrontations over the years. What is clear is that UN operations reflect political considerations and often depart from their original mandate, which is a strength with respect to flexibility but sometimes a weakness with respect to accountability and fidelity to the expectations established at the time the mandate was agreed upon.
There are further issues of lawless geopolitics undertaken with direct or indirect UN blessings. Operationally, especially when enforcement is delegated to members with strong foreign policy goals connected with the issues, exceeding the scope of formal authorization for the use of force can strengthen the cynical impression that the UN can only be effective with respect to war/peace concerns when it puts its operations under the unsupervised control of P5 actors. This happened to a certain extent with respect to the tactics and war-making objectives determined by the US in the first Gulf War of 199 1, creating a controversial gap between the UN role and its geopolitical implementation, leading many commentators to insist that future operations be linked more closely to Security Council supervision.
Also, the UN has been criticized for authorizing operations that seem to deny targeted states their sovereign rights. Such a criticism was made in light of the imposition of sanctions on Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. These sanctions caused massive civilian casualties over the course of the next twelve years. As has been persuasively observed, any use of comprehensive post-conflict sanctions is punitive in effect rather than war-preventive, mostly punishing innocent civilians. Such sanctions are typically imposed in circumstances, as was the case in Iraq after the war, in a society already devastated by damage sustained during a recent war and struggling to recover.
In the subsequent Iraq War of 2003, the United States initiated a non-defensive war and long-term occupation without receiving the required prior authorization from the Security Council, despite its concerted effort to persuade the Security Council members of its justification for a use of force. Although the US-UK coalition defied the UN Charter and ignored the rejection of its arguments by the Security Council, no action was taken in support of UN authority and respect for international law. Not even a resolution of censure was adopted. The UN actually cooperated with the US government once the attack ended and the contested occupation of Iraq commenced. This UN acquiesence in the face of such a fundamental flaunting of its authority, reinforced by the evidence discrediting the major US justification (involving allegations that Iraq was hiding its possession and illicit development of weapons of mass destruction) for attacking Iraq. In effect, a double rejection of UN authority was present—attacking and occupying Iraq without any basis for claiming self-defense or receiving authorization from the UN.
1. See damning insider account by Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (Bloomsbury, 2017).
2. See influential critical assessments in Samantha Powers, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2013).
3. SC/RES/1973 (2011), by a vote of ten in favor, none opposed, and five abstaining (Russia, India. China, Brazil, and Germany).
4. And see Tatianna Carayannis and Thomas Weiss, “The ‘Third’ UN: Imagining Post-COVID-19 Multilateralism,” Global Policy, 12, no. 1 (2021): 5–14.
5. A/RES/377 (1950), the still important Uniting for Peace resolution adopted in the 1950 Korean War, itself an early indication that the UN was not going to work to prevent the outbreak of wars between states as the founders of the UN had hoped and the Charter had envisioned.
6. See International Court of Justice, “Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons,” Advisory Opinion of July 8, 1996, ICJ Reports 1996, 226–267; ICJ, “Legal Consequences of a Construction of a Wall on the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” July 9, 2004, ICJ Reports 2004; and pending ICJ Advisory Opinion request, “Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”
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