Troubled Organization at the Age of 50 : United Nations has had many failures, but the world is better with it than without

The United Nations on its 50th anniversary is an organization far different in size, purpose and prospects from what most of its founding members envisaged when they met in San Francisco to sign its charter in the final weeks of World War II. Membership has swollen from 50 to 185; peacekeeping and observer missions--neither of which are specifically mentioned in the charter--have assumed a central, costly and controversial role in U.N. global operations; and the “scourge of war” that the charter aspired to end remains not just a threat but an all too present and brutal reality.

Some of its most idealistic advocates had hoped, with the failed example of the post-World War I League of Nations before them, that the United Nations might acquire a kind of transcendent authority that would allow it to override the selfish nationalisms that were widely seen as the cause of the destructive global conflict that was just ending. But from its beginning the United Nations was, as indeed it had to be, a voluntary organization of sovereign states and nothing like a world government. As such its powers can consist only of what its members are willing to delegate.

In the 15-member Security Council, where decision making is concentrated, the Cold War’s end has led to a larger measure of consensus and cooperation than was possible in the first 45 years of the organization’s existence. But the particular and inevitably conflicting interests of its members continue to determine how much authority they are willing to cede to the world organization. As with any other voluntary association, the United Nations works when its members agree they have a stake in seeing it succeed, one example being the recently extended Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. The United Nations doesn’t work where members refuse to commit the political, military or economic resources needed for success, as in the peacekeeping efforts in Somalia and Bosnia.

Americans warmly backed the United Nations in its earliest years. But esteem for it in the United States fell sharply during the Cold War era, prompted in no small part by the hostility toward Western interests so often evidenced by Communist and many Third World states. Yet for all its weaknesses and chronic financial problems, the United Nations remains the only--and so the essential--global forum where many of the world’s gravest problems can be discussed and efforts made to manage them. When all is said and done, the ideals on which the United Nations was founded, emphasizing human rights and dignity, justice and respect for law, are intrinsically American ideals. Reason enough for continued firm U.S. support for what the United Nations was meant to be.