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The United Nations (UN) is a global organization of states that aims to find cooperative solutions for international security, economic, and social problems. The first formal use of the term United Nations appeared in the Declaration by the United Nations (January 1, 1942), in which twenty-six Allied countries pledged to defeat the Axis Powers and subscribed to the principles of the Atlantic Charter (August 14, 1941) during World War II (1939-1945). These principles included “the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.”

From August to October 1944, delegates from the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of China met at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., to negotiate the formation of a new organization to replace the League of Nations. Most of the outstanding issues were settled at the Yalta Conference (February 4-11, 1945) among the leaders of the “Big Three” nations: U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), British prime minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965), and Soviet general secretary Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). Shortly thereafter, delegates of fifty nations met in San Francisco to finalize the negotiations, culminating in the signing of the UN Charter on June 26, 1945. On August 8, 1945, the United States became the first country to ratify the Charter. The United Nations Organization came into being on October 24 (celebrated since 1948 as United Nations Day) when the majority of original signers, including the great powers (the four Dumbarton Oaks conveners and France), had ratified the Charter.

Structure

Although the UN Charter opens with the famous phrase “We the peoples of the United Nations,” the United Nations is primarily an organization of sovereign states. Membership is open to all “peace-loving states” (Article 4), but disputes over the admission of new members fell victim after World War II to the cold war conflict. In 1955 the United States and the Soviet Union reached a compromise that allowed for the admission of sixteen new members. Still, controversy persisted over the membership status of the partitioned states of Germany, Korea, Vietnam, and China. Both German states were admitted in 1973 and both Korean states in 1991. Vietnam entered as a single state in 1977. Nationalist China (Taiwan) represented China until November 1971, when the United States ended its objection to the membership of the People’s Republic of China. In 2006 the United Nations had 191 member states.

The UN Charter also established the six “principal organs” of the United Nations: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat. The General Assembly is the United Nations’ plenary body. Aside from occasional special sessions, it meets in annual sessions that usually start in September and last for three months. The General Assembly oversees subsidiary bodies, calls international conferences, approves the budget, and adopts nonbinding resolutions on a wide variety of issues. General Assembly decisions are taken by majority vote based on a one-state—one-vote principle. Since 1987, after lobbying by the United States, critical votes on the budget are taken by unanimity rule (instead of the historical two-thirds majority) in an effort to curtail large annual budget increases. Budget assessments are made on a capacity-to-pay basis. As of 2005, the United States was responsible for 24 percent of the UN budget, followed by Japan (19 percent) and Germany (8 percent). Countries do not always meet their budget obligations in a timely manner: In September 2005 member states owed the United Nations $3 billion in outstanding peacekeeping and regular budget payments ($1.2 billion from the United States alone).

The Security Council has primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. Under chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Security Council can adopt coercive measures, including economic sanctions and the use of force, which are binding on individual member states. The Security Council has five permanent members (China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and ten non-permanent members that are elected for two-year, nonrenewable terms by the General Assembly. (Until 1965, the Security Council only had six nonpermanent members.) Security Council resolutions require an affirmative vote of nine members, including the five permanent members. By 2005 the permanent members had exercised their veto right 244 times, but on only twenty occasions since 1990. The veto threat is, however, still a powerful tool to block unwanted resolutions.

The Economic and Social Council coordinates and supervises the work of numerous commissions and expert bodies on economic and social matters, including human rights. Members are elected for three-year terms by the General Assembly. The Economic and Social Council’s membership has gradually expanded from eighteen to fifty-four. The Economic and Social Council has limited powers other than its ability to submit recommendations to the General Assembly (by majority vote). Formally, the Economic and Social Council coordinates the activities of various specialized agencies, including the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Developing countries have long, and unsuccessfully, pushed for a greater role for the Economic and Social Council vis-a-vis these organizations. Other specialized UN agencies, each with its own budget, membership, and charter, include the International Labor Organization (ILO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The Trusteeship Council was set up to monitor UN trust territories that were not designated as strategic by their administrating powers (strategic trust areas were the Security Council’s responsibility). The Trusteeship Council ceased its operations on November 1, 1994, when the last remaining trust territory (Palau) became independent.

The International Court of Justice, located in The Hague, Netherlands, issues advisory opinions on legal questions brought to it by other UN organs and settles legal disputes submitted to it by member states. Its fifteen judges are elected for nine-year terms by the General Assembly and Security Council. By 2005 the International Court of Justice had delivered twenty-five advisory opinions and eighty-seven judgments on contentious cases, primarily on border and maritime disputes. The binding nature of International Court of Justice opinions depends on whether state parties have previously agreed to its compulsory jurisdiction.

The Secretariat is the United Nations’ bureaucracy. In 2005 it employed around nine thousand international civil servants who answer to the United Nations alone for their activities. While most civil servants are stationed at the UN headquarters in New York, the United Nations also maintains staffed offices elsewhere. The Secretariat is headed by the secretary-general, a prestigious post that has been occupied by Trygve Lie (Norway, 1946—1952), Dag Hammarskjold (Sweden, 1953-1961), U Thant (Burma [Myanmar], 1961-1971), Kurt Waldheim (Austria, 1972-1981), Javier Parez de Cellar (Peru, 1982-1991), Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Egypt, 1992-1996), Kofi Annan (Ghana, 1997-2006), and Ban Ki-moon (South Korea) who was sworn in on December 14, 2006, and began serving on January 1, 2007. Critics have charged that the demands of being the world’s primary diplomat sometimes undermine the secretary-general’s ability to also be an effective manager of a large bureaucracy.

Peace And Security

When states sign the UN Charter, they agree not to use or threaten force “against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations” (Article 2). There are two circumstances under which force is consistent with the United Nations’ purposes: when it is exercised in self-defense (Article 51) and when the Security Council approves a collective action under chapter VII. The first important authorization of a collective action occurred in 1950 (July 7), when the Security Council authorized the United States to install a central command under the UN flag to restore peace and security following the armed attack by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) against the Republic of Korea (South Korea).

UN action in Korea was possible only because the Soviet Union had temporarily vacated its Security Council seat in protest against nationalist China’s representation. After the Soviet delegate returned, the General Assembly adopted the “Uniting for Peace” resolution, which allowed the General Assembly to circumvent a deadlocked Security Council through special emergency sessions. This procedure has been invoked ten times, most notably in 1956 to order the French and British to end their military intervention in the Suez Canal and to create the UN Emergency Force (UNEF I) to provide a buffer between Egyptian and Israeli forces.

UNEF I was the first large-scale example of peacekeeping, an activity not mentioned in the Charter. During the cold war, peacekeeping missions were generally limited to providing a buffer between warring parties at the invitation of those parties, prime examples being the longstanding UN forces in Cyprus and Lebanon. An exception was the more ambitious 20,000-person force employed in the Congo between 1960 and 1964. This operation failed to achieve its main objectives, led to a protracted conflict about peacekeeping financing, and cost respected Secretary-General Hammarskjold his life when his plane crashed in the Congo on September 18, 1961.

UN activity in international security was reinvigorated with the end of the cold war. In 1988 and 1989, for the first time in a decade, the Security Council authorized new peacekeeping missions that were sent to cold war hotspots such as Afghanistan, Angola, Namibia, and Nicaragua. A transformation in UN collective security occurred with the adoption of Security Council Resolution 678 on November 29, 1990, which authorized the use of “all necessary means” if Iraq would not vacate Kuwait by January 15, 1991. The resolution conferred legitimacy on the use of force against Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition. Since then, the Security Council has granted similar authorizations to (groups of) states in eleven cases, including East Timor (with Australia as the leading state) and Haiti (with the United States as leader).

A second significant shift occurred in 1992, when the Security Council authorized the deployment of large peacekeeping forces to end civil wars in Cambodia and Yugoslavia. This was merely the prelude to increased UN involvement in domestic conflicts across the globe. Between 1991 and 2005, the Security Council authorized forty-eight peacekeeping and other multinational uses of force, almost all concerning civil conflicts rather than interstate wars. These efforts were not without risk: more than two thousand UN peacekeepers have lost their lives, most since 1991. The United Nations has also become actively involved in postwar reconstruction and has even run transitional administrations, most notably in East Timor and Kosovo. Moreover, it has created international tribunals to try war crimes in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and the former Yugoslavia.

Despite its active record since the cold war’s end, the United Nations’ contribution to the preservation of peace and security has come under serious scrutiny. First, the United Nations has been unable to prevent genocides in Rwanda (1994) and the Sudan (2005). Second, the Security Council has been deadlocked on important cases and has not been able to prevent states or coalitions of states from going it alone in the absence of UN authorization, as illustrated by the intervention of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Kosovo in 1999 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Third, weak and understaffed UN missions have occasionally done more harm than good, as illustrated by the United Nations’ failure to maintain the promised safe haven of Srebrenica (1995). Fourth, UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq caused much suffering among the Iraqi population while failing to resolve the conflict. Moreover, the UN “Oil for Food” office allowed massive fraud to occur in the administration of the sanctions.

Some critics justifiably lament UN bureaucratic and peacekeeping practices, as acknowledged by the United Nations’ remarkable Brahimi Report (2000). Yet, the United Nations ultimately remains an organization of states. The United Nations can be a useful vehicle for cooperation on those issues where states are committed, but it has few means beyond persuasion to compel states to make committed efforts. In all, most analysts believe that the United Nations has had a modest but significant positive impact, especially on the resolution of civil wars.

Other Issues

The United Nations has played an active role on a large range of other issues. The United Nations was an important arena for the transformation of former colonies into sovereign states. To many new states, UN membership served as the affirmation of their sovereignty. Moreover, General Assembly Resolution 1514 (December 14, 1960) became the most influential political declaration of the existence of a right to self-determination and the illegitimacy of colonial rule.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides the foundation for the treatment of human rights in the United Nations. The United Nations administers other global human-rights instruments, such as the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1987), and organizes global conferences, such as the Beijing Women’s Conference (1995), that set the normative debate on human rights. It has, however, few enforcement mechanisms other than public shaming through the Human Rights Commission, which critics charge is political and selective.

The United Nations has also provided a forum for arms control negotiations and administers important disarmament treaties. An independent agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), monitors observance of nuclear treaties and can refer violators to the Security Council, which can then decide on coercive measures.

The United Nations also plays an important role in economic development and humanitarian relief, primarily through special programs and funds, such as the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN Development program (UNDP), and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). UNHCR provides a crucial coordinating role in providing relief to the world’s refugees (around twenty million in 2005). UNDP is most active in the development and monitoring of the UN Millennium Development goals: an ambitious set of development targets to be achieved by 2015.

The most difficult issue for the United Nations continues to be the Middle East. The United Nations was instrumental in creating the state of Israel and in resolving the 1956 Suez crisis. Yet, its ability to play a constructive role has been compromised by increased politicization. Israel and its defenders charge that the United Nations regularly adopts inflammatory resolutions that unfairly target Israel. For example, between 1975 and 1991, the General Assembly annually adopted a resolution that equated Zionism with racism, a charge that resurfaced at the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. Defenders of Palestine contend that Israel has repeatedly ignored General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, as well as International Court of Justice rulings.

Reform is also perennially on the United Nations’ agenda. Reform attempts generally involve the creation of a blue-ribbon committee, including the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, established in 2003. The recommendations of these committees rarely lead to fundamental changes. Instead, the United Nations regularly reinvents itself in response to major events and the ensuing new demands on the organization.

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