The Disunited Nations : As...

World War II ended with promises of peace, stability and development. Democracy had triumphed over fascism; the world’s people expected an end to colonial greed and global violence; Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower hoped we had witnessed “the last civil war to tear humanity apart.”

Even before war’s end, the United Nations was created to ensure the future. Unlike the moribund League of Nations--too weak to enforce or alter the punitive, unworkable Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I--the United Nations would be respected, inclusive. Democracy was on its agenda from the start. The new “parliament of the world” would establish a “permanent system of general security” and universal conditions of social justice. A big idea: big enough to end the scourge of war, forever.

Largely an American vision with bipartisan support, the U.N. was given its name by FDR, who also imbued it with the legacy of his incomparable enthusiasm. Almost immediately swamped by Cold War enmity, the U.N. faced astonishing controversies, devastating crises. Nevertheless, for 50 years, it grew in strength and vision, and for millions of people throughout this planet, it has ensured access to health care, literacy, dignity. Today, however, the U.N. faces a difficult future--without the support it once had from the U.S., the best of its contributions are ignored, trivialized or mocked. Last week, moreover, the U.N.’s top financial official said the organization was veering toward bankruptcy.

While U.N. agencies save lives every day, and the U.N. sponsors such hopeful activities as world summits on women, development and the environment, various American politicians have declared war on its very existence. When did this contempt for the U.N. begin? Why did the U.S. walk out of UNESCO 10 years ago and then fail to return despite many changes and UNESCO’s demonstrably splendid work? And why did President Clinton not even refer to the U.N. in last month’s State of the Union address?

Different in perspective and content, these three books issued to coincide with the U.N.’s 50th anniversary were produced by people who care deeply about the U.N. Stanley Meisler’s narrative history of its first 50 years explains the issues from the First World’s point of view. A former foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times who now works in its Washington bureau, Meisler recounts an exciting story of the U.N.’s origins and agonies. Using an engaging biographical technique, he focuses on the U.N.’s key players. His chapters on Norway’s Trygvie Lee, America’s first ranking African American diplomat, Ralph Bunche (who pioneered the U.N.’s peacekeeping efforts in the Middle East), Sweden’s Dag Hammarskjold, the former Nazi Kurt Waldheim and Burma’s U Thant’s efforts to achieve peace in Vietnam are positively stirring.

During the 1960s, Meisler shows, the U.N. was increasingly marginalized by Vietnam and the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War. But the real trouble began with decolonization and the explosion of new member states, each with its own needs and vision and vote. The U.S. considered all independence movements to be pro-Soviet and never accepted the notion of “unaligned” nations during the protracted agony of the East-West schism. And then there was that peculiar Soviet-American romance with nuclear bombs and missiles.

Meisler vividly recalls the sad and tragic days that illustrated the U.N.’s weakness as the world wobbled at the edge of the nuclear abyss during the Cuban missile crisis. The real war against multilateralism began, however, when Gerald Ford appointed Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.N. ambassador after reading his article, “The U.S. in Opposition.” Moynihan, who had counseled Nixon “to treat the issue of race with ‘benign neglect,’ ” now wanted the U.S. to stand up to that U.N. bloc of developing nations that had formed the Group of 77 in 1968, and demanded new economic policies to redress the balance of trade, power, influence. According to Meisler, the stage was now set “for one of the great battle royals of the U.N.--Ambassador Moynihan Vs the Third World.” Although Meisler is generally fair-minded, his contempt for “the irascible, unreasonable, smug Third World” informs his presentation of the Third World’s efforts to achieve either a new world information order or equitable economic arrangements.

According to Meisler, the U.N. sank to its lowest levels during the 1970s and 1980s, when: “Paralysis, Third World cant, the hypocritical anti-American ranting of ambassadors from little tyrannies, corruption and waste” caused politicians to wonder “whether there ought to be a United Nations after all.”

The fact is there are many civil wars going on today: within countless nations for democracy and justice, and across the globe for an end to neocolonial domination by the World Bank and transnational corporations. There is no Third World unity, any more than there is political unity in the First World. On every level, the process moves on. The good news is that much of the debate takes place at the U.N.; there are confrontations without bloodshed. Folks now representing 189 nations talk to each other, actually achieve agreement on issues of the utmost long-range importance:

Meisler’s emphasis on peacekeeping and Third World arrogance limits his scope, and he virtually ignores the 20-year struggle to achieve women’s rights, equity and dignity worldwide. One of the U.N.’s greatest triumphs was the 1995 Women’s Conference in Beijing, where representatives of 189 nations agreed by consensus to a document that describes a future of dignity, human rights, economic justice, equal rights to education, training, health care, work, environmental integrity.

Meisler’s account of the Reagan administration’s decision to withdraw from UNESCO is also provocative. He considers Sorbonne educated Director General Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow of Senegal arrogant, “stubborn, egotistical.” How dare “autocratic Third World governments joined by the Soviet Union” call for a new world information and communication order? Meisler then details bitter examples of repression, minimizing the long history of propaganda and cultural domination from the print media to satellite communication.

Although Meisler does not highlight the work of the humanitarian U.N. agencies (UNICEF, UNEP, FAO), he takes the U.N. peacekeeping efforts through to the current situations in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Bosnia, and concludes that for all its follies, foibles, and failures, the U.N. has served the world “nobly and well for 50 years.”

Focusing on the U.N. during the 1990s, journalist Phyllis Bennis sees a more complex set of issues behind the current effort to defund and destroy the U.N. In “Calling the Shots,” Bennis shows how a worldwide democratic crisis is being played out at the U.N. The issue is control: Has a North-South schism replaced the East-West schism? In a bitter foreword, Erskine Childers points out that the entire U.N. budget, serving the world’s 5.7 billion people, is $11 billion a year--which “represents just under $2 per human being alive on Planet Earth, while governments are spending about $150 per capita of humankind on military establishments.” And the much ridiculed civil service of the U.N., that “sprawling, swollen bureaucracy,” actually numbers only 52,000 people worldwide. That, notes Childers, a longtime U.N. diplomat, is less than the civil servants employed by the state of Wyoming, or the district health staff of Wales.

America’s stingy attitude toward U.N. programs has had a long, if uneven history. In 1953, Eleanor Roosevelt saved the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) from attacks by Cold Warriors who sought to defund it because it was “communistic.” She urged that the U.S. lead the effort instead:

“There are about 900 million children under 15 on earth today. More than half . . . live and die in want . . . they are familiar with hunger, cold and disease. The only organization that even begins to answer their needs is UNICEF. Yet its total expenditure has been less than half the cost of a single aircraft carrier.”

Bennis’ book is scrupulously researched and vigorously written. She focuses on the humanitarian work achieved by U.N. agencies in poverty and population policy, sustainable development and environmental protection.

For 50 years, the U.N. has been a much neglected story in the United States. If there is one book that might all by itself change that careless attitude, it is “A Global Affair,” edited by Amy Janello and Brennon Jones. Comprehensive, fact-filled, and beautifully packaged, it features personal reflections, letters, 400 photographs and 15 profoundly moving essays by leading U.N. journalists.

The book gives one an immediate and vivid sense of the human face of the world’s agony, and of the great good achieved by the U.N.’s pioneering work. According to U.N. diplomat Brian Urquhart: “It put human rights on the map as a criterion for national and international behavior and turned its attention to a new generation of global problems . . . that will help determine the future of the human race. It moved into virtually all major fields of human activity and made substantial progress in many of them.”

The book’s excellence is in the details, and the photographs are magnificent. One photo of actress Audrey Hepburn, for example, her own face bony and haunted, looking into the distance as she holds a starving child outside a feeding center in Somalia in 1992, months before her own death, dramatically tells UNICEF’s story of struggle and commitment. Another photo of Indian women hand-watering a grove of tiny trees upon a parched field tells the story of the Department for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development. There are photos of wanderers and refugees receiving help from 1945 to the present. Can we really turn our backs on the world? Do we really want to destroy the only organization humanity created to consider the world’s people? Any one of these books may help us decide: Any one of these pictures might move us to care.