Can the United Nations Survive the Next
Fifty Years?
By Gregory
R. Copley.
Presented at the International
Conference on The Role of the United
Nations in the 21st Century. At the
European Cultural Centre of Delphi,
Greece: July 2, 2006.
History has
proven that all institutions, alliances,
confederations, even nations, religions, and
cultures have their time, and then fade.
Some re-invent themselves to find new leases
of life, and new missions. Some survive only
as historical lessons for future
generations. Why, then, do we suppose that
the United Nations (UN) will re-invent
itself to endure beyond the strategic era
and framework for which it was created?
The UN had a
clearly-defined initial mandate � couched,
perhaps, in utopian terms � to manage or at
least dampen the process of change which
existed, or was foreseeable, at the time of
its birth in 1945. To achieve its goal � and
to succeed, which it did admirably in some
major respects � it became a complex and
capable organism. So, too, however, did the
Western European Union (WEU) and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),
amphictyonies born around the same time
as the UN.
The evolution
of history rendered first the WEU obsolete
and then NATO, although both confederal
organizations linger. So it is not
unreasonable to ask whether the UN, too, has
reached the end of its season.
This paper,
then, poses the arbitrary question: �Can the
United Nations Survive the Next 50 Years?�
Indeed, while it is clear that the global
society needs, perhaps more than ever,
mechanisms of cooperation, it must be asked
whether the UN itself � as our present major
mechanism � has a mission commensurate with
the needs of a world which differs in
prospect vastly from the rigid structures of
Westphalian states which characterized the
Cold War Era? Has the UN become sclerotic?
Has its original purpose been usurped or
corrupted; or has its mission been
completed? Is it unable to adapt its
mission, personnel, and structures to new
realities?
It has been
said that the UN was created to provide
justice to the smaller, less powerful
nations of the world. While this may have
been a byproduct of its development, it was
not the basis for its establishment. The
creation of the United Nations after World
War II attempted to impose the peace of the
victorious upon the world, affording
paternalistic protection to the defeated and
the smaller nations. In reality, it
attempted, de facto, to freeze the world
through treaties and coercion into an
acceptance of the 1945 status quo, and 1945
values and concepts of society. It contained
the natural aspirations of peoples � and the
normal, historical cycle of the creation,
development, and even the death, of
societies and nations � as a means of
constraining war.
The fear of
apocalyptic war, with overwhelming weapons,
which seemed to be the promise of the next
era after World War II, was sufficient to
cause obedience to the tenets of the United
Nations. The alternative to adherence to a
common structure appeared to be the
destruction of the planet. Indeed, as has
been evidenced since the early Delphic
amphictyony, war, or the threat of war,
has proven the best condition for the
creation of confederacies. And peace and
wealth have proven the cause of their end.
In this regard, then, the United Nations
proved to be resoundingly successful. If not
the United Nations itself, then the threat
of the alternative. A Cold War did not
merely emerge after World War II. Its
existence was guaranteed by the United
Nations, and the artificial structure which
it created. And indeed this seemed
preferable to the alternative of revived
global hot war. But when the Cold War
collapsed, so, too did the structural
framework, or at least the need for it in
its 1945 form.
And as the Cold
War ended, the world�s response was to flow
around the pseudo-status quo of
rigidly-defined states. Globalization � the
reality of the marketplace � pays only lip
service to borders, and the free movement of
ideas, technologies, and peoples have
reduced the sovereign powers of states.
The reaction to globalization by the Union
Nations has been to attempt to enshrine and
enforce transnational behavioral modalities
� �international law� � as a means of
constraining the phenomenon, rather than to
allow a return to the more visceral and
customary modalities of inter-state behavior
which have their origins in historical
societal competition. All evolution and the
continued existence of all living organisms,
after all, have always depended upon
constant challenge.
Thus, the
groans of fear and anguish which arose in
parts of the world when the US was viewed as
the �sole global superpower�, after the end
of the Cold War, were unwarranted and
unrealistic. The utopian belief in the
eventual creation of a single �world
government� � that is, the UN, not the US �
is equally unrealistic, and yet many
seemingly intelligent people hold the hope
that the United Nations could fulfill such a
function.
However, the UN
has acquired none of the qualities which
historically would qualify it to achieve the
status of �world governance�: it neither
reaps, nor does it sow.1
It has no intrinsic power to enforce
compliance, other than to act as the
rallying point for weaker states against the
stronger. But it is the stronger states
alone, because of their funding and forces,
which give the UN what credibility and
capability it has. If the UN moves too
overtly to oppose its major sponsors, then
these sponsors will � to protect their own
interests � quite validly remove their
economic power for the UN to survive.
But as we saw
with the American Continental Congress and
the European Union, among others, the UN has
exhibited a tendency to creep toward
federalism, using the confederation only as
a transition to greater dreams. In this
light, then, the later ambitions for world
governance for the UN were certainly beyond
the desires of the founding intellects of
the organization, who merely wanted it to
guarantee for as long as possible the
sovereign powers and accumulated victory of
their states. Those ambitions for world
governance are indeed breathtaking in scope:
to achieve global dominance without a shot
fired.
History has proven that a unipolar strategic
environment is not sustainable for any great
period; absolute control absolutely and
rapidly gives way to the bifurcation of
power, at the very least, until a
multi-polar strategic environment
re-emerges. When the end of the Cold War,
through force of strategic power, created a
brief thought of a unipolar strategic
environment, the situation soon gave way to
the reality that the end of bipolarism in
fact spawned multipolarism. This in turn
will ultimately lead again to a new
bipolarism, as smaller states once again
coalesce around major powers.
The thought,
then, that unipolar global governance could
emerge through voluntary abdication of power
by states to the United Nations is indeed
utopian in the light of the constancy of
human patterns of behavior which dictate
otherwise.
In any event,
six decades of growing bureaucratic
entrenchment have limited the ability of the
UN � or NATO and the WEU, for that matter �
to adapt to the trauma of post-Cold War
realities. The �trauma of post-Cold War
realities� represent a strategic upheaval
every bit as transforming as the end of
World War II itself. In this new world,
globalization has vitiated the very building
blocks of the UN: the Westphalian-style
sovereign states. And most of the states
which have recently emerged are not truly
viable without paternalistic protection, and
were not viable even before globalization
struck.
By definition, for the UN to be viable even
as a confederal structure, its members must
have true characteristics of sovereignty,
including viability of economy, security,
and the ability to determine their own
fates. Increasingly, and particularly since
the end of the Cold War also ended the
patrimonial sustenance of many minor states,
many members of the UN have not exhibited
the qualities of true sovereignty which
could give substance and credibility to the
UN itself.
There are major
similarities, and major differences, between
the situations which prevailed at the end of
World War II and those which prevail today.
In 1945, the principal world leaders �
Churchill, Truman, Stalin, and Chiang
Kai-shek � were in a position to agree on a
structure to prevent further conflict. They
had imposed peace, but were either
economically, militarily, or socially
exhausted to different degrees, and while
the end of the war saw them considering
their own separate, and often mutually
competitive, futures, they all agreed on the
need for the chaos of a transformed world to
be tamed and managed.
That situation
does not prevail today. There is little or
no agreement between the major global
leaders as to the ideal path toward the
future victories of their societies. Only
the societies which became independent in
the post-World War II and post Cold War
periods, and those who had squandered the
peace of the Cold War era, cling to the
belief that the United Nations offers them
protection. The end of the Cold War and the
consequent flood of globalization not only
brought about a revival of multipolarism, it
also brought about an era � perhaps a
transitional era � in which states could
once again grasp control over their own
destinies. So while globalization vitiated
some aspects of sovereignty, the end of the
constraints of the Cold War also reinstated
the concept of the responsibility of
societies for their own survival, wellbeing,
and victory.
This, then, is
a very different world from 1945. Will China
today in its climb toward victory
subordinate itself to the United Nations?
Will India? Will Russia? Will the US? All
will use existing amphictyonies as
mechanisms of maneuver, but the dynamic
elements of the new power structure will not
depend on, or revere, the authority of the
UN.
The decision to
create the United Nations locked the spoils
of war into the responsibility of the
conquering parties, and the subsequent
decolonization of much of the developing
world was automatically swept into this
process. Indeed, it was an essential
component of the move from colonial state to
recognized sovereign entity. And many in the
world believed that a permanent and defined
structure had come as the salvation for all
humanity; the start of a world government
capable of ending the rigid state structures
which had supposedly caused war, and which
would henceforth become structured elements
within a global government.
The United
Nations was never likely to be anything
other than a temporary solution to
humanity�s perpetual internecine
competition.
Yet today many
view the UN as a permanent edifice; a
promise of tomorrow, freezing the
comfortable status quo into a definition of
the future. History has shown that there can
be no such permanence in a world constantly
changing. The same beliefs shaped the
creation of the first �United Nations� at
Delphi, 2,500 years ago, and the formation
of the League of Nations after World War I.
The chaos of
population growth and population movement,
as well as the accompanying new age of the
birth and death of nations, spells the end
of the artificial rigidity which the UN
brought to the world. The antagonisms which
many in the US feel toward the UN will not
be the cause for the UN�s gradual
disappearance into insignificance. Neither
will the UN be saved by the hopes of its
supporters, who pray for the UN to be their
guardian and to substitute for their own
obligations to strive individually for the
victory of their own societies.
The United
Nations will soon become largely irrelevant
because its principle job, the freezing of
the status quo in 1945 terms, is finished.
The UN staved off, for as long as possible,
the chaos and lawlessness which � because of
globalization and the movement of humanity,
searching to find its own boundaries � is
now defining itself in natural terms, not
through the artificial construct of the old
men of Yalta. Part of humanity is on the
move as never before; the boundary fences
have been trammeled by people, ideas,
electronic signals, and the flood of goods
and money. But human reaction to the
disruption is to rebuild classical
nationalism of a type which predates Westphalianism. This will unquestionably
lead to a threat to the multi-cultural
modern nation-states � the US, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, etc. � as
individual �nations� within them seek
sovereignty. We are already seeing the
tendency to either break states into their
regional or cultural components, or to make
states mono-cultural, mono-ethnic, or
mono-linguistic.
The task of
nation-building, or the retention of
national cohesion, then, is increasingly
challenged, and the threat of conflict
escalates dramatically as new borders are
demanded.
With this in
mind, the UN in its present form belongs now
to a bygone era, just as Delphi�s
amphictyony and the League of Nations,
and other confederal structures of
multi-society governance come and go. Some
functional UN components clearly lend
themselves to development into viable,
stand-alone amphictyonies. It is the
overarching structure of the UN which no
longer relates to the changing situation,
partly because the building blocks � the
member states � are either changing or will
change.
And while some UN functional agencies will
find new life, some are clearly resisted by
reality. For example, the UN�s attempt to
build a new priesthood for the
pseudo-religion it now calls �international
law�, some of which is based on historical
practice, is in large part based on the
imposition of the current moral and
political values of one set of societies
onto other societies.
Much of the
self-righteousness of the UN�s attempts to
broaden the International Court of Justice (ICJ)
to the war crimes tribunals and the like
will ensure that the international legal
system will be the first to be relegated to
the sidelines in the transforming global
structure. It is likely that the next to be
treated with pragmatic selectivity is the
World Trade Organization (WTO), the efforts
of which to impose logic and harmony in the
trading system have already been stubbornly
rejected by the major signatories to the WTO,
such as the US and the European Union.
The
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
has already passed from the realm of reality
to that of a Greek tragedy in its pretence
to be an amphictyony of realism, as a
subordinate part of the UN, which controls
the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It has
failed completely to control the real spread
of nuclear weapons technology; it merely
manages a global charade where stated
positions have little or nothing to do with
reality. We have only to observe also how
the UN�s office of the Secretary-General
allowed itself to be mis-used in the Annan
Plan for the supposed resolution of the
division of Cyprus in 2004 to see that
reality, or even the UN�s mission to
protect, are now absent from many UN
operations.
So we would indeed be fortunate if the
overarching body of the UN itself was able
to survive the next few decades as anything
other than an increasingly irrelevant shell,
and a forum for frustrated rhetoric and the
handwringing assignment of blame for the lot
of those states which do not take their
destinies into their own hands. We saw that
just such a decline into meaninglessness of
the League of Nations � when it abdicated
its self-appointed duty to stop the invasion
of Ethiopia, for example, or the Japanese
invasion of Manchuria � led to the vacuum in
confederal relationships. This may have
allowed World War II to begin. Certainly,
the League could not prevent it.
The UN today
unquestioningly allows the sovereign
recognition of states such as Montenegro and
Kosovo, which fail to meet the historical
criteria for sovereignty, while denying
recognition to, for example, Somaliland,
which does meet such criteria. [Meanwhile,
UN-recognized Somalia, former Italian
Somaliland, no longer even exists as a
state, other than by the recognition it has
internationally.]
This all demonstrates how far the UN has
drifted from reality. And the emerging
global transition will, over the coming
decade, essentially bypass the artificiality
of the UN, deeming it irrelevant. States
will do what they have to do to survive and
succeed. Blood will be shed in the process,
and, to paraphrase Omar Khayy�m, not all thy
piety or wit can call it back, nor cancel
half a jot of it.
In short, then,
the United Nations would be required to
transform itself in a way which most of its
members could not imagine nor condone if it
was to be able to manage the coming Age of
Transformation with the success with which
it handled the post-World War II era. There
is no indication at the organizational level
� let alone the membership level � that the
UN even wishes to change; it merely wishes
the world to conform to it.
King Canute
could not turn back the tide; and the great
achievements of our current science do not
yet give the UN the ability which Canute
lacked.
So, no, the
United Nations cannot survive the next 50
years. It is even now in the throes of
death. Perhaps, as with the practice which
bankrupted ancient Incan culture, the world
will continue to expend its treasury to feed
the body long after the spirit has left the
flesh. But ultimately, dead is dead.
Footnote:
1. See, for example, Lister, Frederick
K., The Early Security Confederations: From
the Ancient Greeks to the United Colonies of
New England, Westport, Connecticut, 1999:
Greenwood Press. In this well-researched
book, Lister � a 34-year veteran of the UN
Secretariat � implicitly notes that the UN
lacks the power to enforce. �� [T]he
post-Cold War years have confirmed how
ill-prepared that [world] community is to
evolve into an all-inclusive confederal-type
union. the inability of the members of the
League of Nations and of the United Nations
to make their respective collective security
systems work effectively supports the
pervasive pessimism regarding the present
potential of any global confederal-type
system to keep the peace. A global
peacekeeping organization may eventually
become feasible. But first, much greater
support will need to be generated among
political decision makers and world public
opinion.�
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