U.N. at 40 : Much to Do

The United Nations marks the 40th anniversary of its founding today with some of the same mixed emotions that so often attend 40th birthday celebrations. There is a good deal of disappointment about unrealized dreams along with a sense of accomplishment. There is a universal acceptance of the utility of the organization, a feeling dulled because the novelty has worn off. And there is also universal regret that more of the concept of 1945 has not been realized.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz told the Security Council recently that “The United Nations today is a troubled organization, but that is, in part, because it mirrors a troubled world.” He was addressing the body that has been, perhaps, the greatest disappointment. The charter foresaw at the end of World War II an era of peace enforced collectively by the five great powers through the Security Council. The Big Five--the United States, Soviet Union, Britain, France and China--became the five permanent members of the council, each with veto power. But the charter did not foresee the Cold War, the revolution in China, the extraordinary pace of decolonization that tripled the membership. Hostility, not the anticipated unanimity, characterized big-power relations and infected the organization.

There is much to do.

Only one major colony, Namibia, remains in the world, evidence in itself of the effectiveness of the United Nations in facilitating decolonization. But among the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa and the Western Hemisphere, among almost all of the Third World, there is grievous and continuing need for the sort of assistance that the world organization uniquely provides in finance, economic development, political reorganization.

U.N. peacekeeping units, precluded by big-power unilateral initiatives, have had no role in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Czechoslovakia or Hungary. But they have helped cool tempers and ease tensions in Kashmir, Cyprus and the Middle East, they have turned back aggression in Korea, they have struggled with the convulsions of nationhood in the Belgian Congo, now Zaire, and they still stand guard on Israel’s frontiers, welcome alternative to a renewal of hostilities there. That function needs elaboration and perfection.

Much that the organization accomplishes is invisible. No one can ever evaluate precisely the role played by quiet corridor diplomacy at U.N. headquarters in October, 1962, when the world teetered close to nuclear conflict in the Cuban missile crisis. Each year’s General Assembly, however truculent the rhetoric, however troubling the seemingly mindless bloc voting, is also a switchboard for dozens of chiefs of state and foreign ministers, meeting as they can nowhere else, sometimes for pomp alone, but often for calculated maneuvering to defuse some of the scores of conflicts that still plague the world.

As there is disappointment and frustration, so is there also a sense of progress in the way that the organization and its specialized agencies have been able to marshal global resources in attacking disease, malnutrition and illiteracy. The process has tried the patience of Western nations that once controlled the organization, but it has also been for them, and for the United States in particular, a triumph of sorts, for it is their values that the organization has made central in its adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“We must be realistic about our difficulties and the dangers that we face,” Javier Perez de Cuellar, U.N. secretary general, asserted in his annual report. “But let us also resolve to find the ways by which, together, we can surmount them.”

In 40 years, no one has contrived a better place for that effort than the United Nations.