Global Cooperation
All my life the United Nations has been a beacon of hope. Now it is under threat.
On my first visit to New York, back in 1988, I toured the United Nations Building which overlooks the Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island. My youthful idealism was quickly sated as the young diplomat who showed us around explained that the materials used to construct the General Assembly Hall were sourced from more than 40 different member states. The gorgeous wood panelling came from Nicaragua, I remember.
The UN was founded in 1945, successor to the League of Nations, itself established just 25 years earlier in the wake of the previous world war. Indeed, it was the civilizational catastrophe of The Great War that, as the moral ambitions of ordinary people outstripped those of politicians, paved the way for an international forum in which disputes between nations might be resolved without resort to war.
Despite the efforts of its founders and overwhelming public support in many countries, the League failed. Created by the Treaty of Versailles in 1920, like much of that ‘agreement’ it was doomed from the outset. The United States never joined, Germany and Japan left in 1933, and the Soviet Union, which finally signed up in 1934, was expelled five years later when it invaded Finland.
The League did have notable successes in regional conflict resolution, but it was quite unable to prevent the slide to a second world war, and in 1943 the Allied powers agreed to replace it with the UN.
Next month marks the 80th anniversary of the United Nations Charter coming into effect. But as former under-secretary general Martin Griffiths wrote yesterday in The Guardian, all is not well at the UN.
While the political causes of its struggles echo those of the League in the 1930s - an increasingly fragmented and adversarial world order - as Griffiths points out, the UN is not only losing funding (and is likely to face a potentially terminal blow if Trump carries out his threats) but it is also suffering from a profound loss of courage.
For decades now, the UN has succeeded not because of the way it was set up (the right of veto of the five original nuclear powers has always been decidedly unhelpful) but in spite of the meddling of its members. In the process it has generated its own diplomatic hegemony and assumed a position of global moral leadership. It has attracted the most principled and determined diplomats to its staff, people determined to use the moral weight of UN to resolve conflicts and prevent wars in situations where bilateral diplomacy would inevitably have failed.
But with the US and Russia both now labouring under authoritarian regimes that care nothing for diplomacy and pour scorn on the very idea of cooperation between nations, and with many other member states withholding funds because of economic failings and reducing tax revenues at home, the prospects for the UN look bleak.
The United Nations has been a beacon of hope for those of us who believe in the possibility of a better world. The scale of the problems we now face, not least climate change and the inability of the global economy any longer to distribute the benefits of technological progress equitably, urgently demands much greater cooperation between nations - quite the reverse of the determined antagonism and wilful trashing of long-standing accords that characterise the current global order. If the UN goes, it will constitute a massive step backward for our civilization.
The fate of the UN encapsulates the growing gap between the best of humanity and the worst. For now, those who would gladly drag us back to the dark ages appear to have the upper hand. We cannot let them win.