It’s Flawed, but It’s Still Needed : At 50, U.N. continues to play a key role in world affairs

The United Nations marks its 50th anniversary on Tuesday, an organization whose growth, role in world affairs and internal problems could hardly have been envisaged by those who were present at its creation in the euphoric days after World War II.

Since the founding conference in San Francisco in 1945, U.N. membership has swollen from 50--the countries that had, in greater or lesser degree, taken part in the wartime anti-Axis coalition--to a now nearly universal 185 states. The newest to join, the Pacific archipelago of Palau, population about 16,000, took its seat last December.

The wartime big-five Allies remain as permanent and veto-equipped members of the Security Council, but their political place in global affairs has changed markedly over the last half-century.

Britain, on whose vast colonial empire it was said the sun never set, and France have separated themselves from virtually all of the disparate territories their armies and fleets claimed in the 19th Century. The multinational Soviet Union is no more, its place at the council table now held by the Russia from which the old Communist empire was centrally ruled. China, whose seat was--with powerful American support--fictively claimed until 1971 by a regime that was able to control only the island of Taiwan, has become a far more important player in regional and world affairs. The United States remains the world’s dominant economic and military power. But it is no longer the economic colossus it was in the years after World War II, and it has long since lost its monopoly in nuclear weapons.

POST-COLD WAR FACTORS: The decline and finally the end of the Cold War boosted the effectiveness of the United Nations by clearing the way for the removal of most of the ideological frictions that prevented consensus on issues in which great-power interests conflicted. It also sharply cut the leverage once enjoyed by many Third World states that seized profitable opportunities to play off West against East. At the same time, greater East-West cooperation, notably in peacekeeping efforts, has helped deepen the financial woes facing the United Nations.

The overall U.N. debt now stands at about $3.7 billion, most of it resulting from the huge expansion in peacekeeping operations authorized by a more cooperative Security Council. The United States alone owes an embarrassing $1.4 billion, with Russia and Ukraine runners-up among the debtor states. As an act of legal and moral responsibility Congress should square the U.S. debt.

U.S. CALL FOR CHANGE: Nonetheless, Congress is absolutely right to insist that the 31.15% of peacekeeping costs assessed on the United States be reduced to 25%, to reflect changes in world distribution of wealth in recent years. And Secretary of State Warren Christopher is absolutely right to insist, as he did in a strong speech earlier this month, that the United Nations radically restructure itself by eliminating or consolidating overlapping agencies and programs, by slashing staff, by imposing a moratorium on excessively expensive international conferences and by rooting out the mismanagement and corruption that have become all too prevalent at many levels.

The 50-year record of the United Nations is inevitably an uneven one, though overall the good it has done far outweighs its failures. The truth that remains in the end is that if the United Nations didn’t exist, diplomats would have to invent it, for the political business of the world requires a truly global organization operating under the kind of principles contained in the U.N. Charter. For all its evident administrative and bureaucratic flaws--and with effective management most can be corrected--the United Nations remains literally irreplaceable.