International Politics. United Nations. Reforms

1. The United Nations is an international organization created to maintain international peace and promote human rights.

2. It was founded in 1945 after the Second World War.

3. The U.N. began with 51 countries and is now comprised of 193 Member States.

4. The U.N. reaches virtually every corner of the world.

5. The U.N. is best known for peacekeeping, peacebuilding, conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance.

6. The United Nations has four main goals.

7. The U.N.’s first purpose is to keep peace throughout the world.

8. The second goal is to develop friendly relations.

9. The third purpose is to assist nations in encouraging human rights, helping the poor, and improving hunger, disease and literacy.

10. The fourth goal is to operate as a center—a community—for achieving these goals.

11. The U.N. provides food to 90 million people in over 75 countries.

12. They assist over 34 million refugees.

13. They work with 140 nations to combat climate change.

14. The U.N. vaccinates 58 percent of the world’s children.

15. They keep peace with 120,000 peace keepers over 4 continents.

16. The U.N. assists about 50 countries per year in elections.

17. They protect human rights through 80 different treaties and declarations.

18. They fight poverty by helping 370 million rural poor individuals achieve better living circumstances.

19. The U.N. mobilizes $12.5 billion in humanitarian aid.

20. They assist about 30 million women a year by their maternal health efforts.

Atlantic Charter

After World War I, an international group developed the League of Nations to solve disputes between countries. When World War II started, the initiative failed but highlighted the need for a new, reformed organization that could promote global peace.

In August 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill held a secret meeting where they discussed the possibility of starting an international peace effort. They came up with a declaration called the Atlantic Charter, which outlined ideal goals of war and paved the way for the development of the U.N.

The United States joined the war in December 1941, and the title “United Nations” was first adopted to identify the countries that allied against Germany, Italy and Japan.
Representatives from 26 Allied nations met in Washington, D.C. on January 1, 1942 to sign the Declaration of the United Nations, which essentially described the war objectives of the Allied powers. The United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union led the charge.

U.N. Charter

Over the next few years, several meetings took place to draft a post-war charter that would decisively describe the roles of the U.N.
The main principles and structure of the United Nations Charter were determined by leaders at the United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO) in San Francisco on April 25, 1945.
After the war ended, the official United Nations Charter was ratified by 51 members on October 24, 1945.

U.N. Bodies

The U.N. is divided into different bodies, including the following:
General Assembly: The General Assembly is the main policymaking body of the U.N. that votes on decisions the organization makes. All 193 members are represented in this branch.
Security Council: This 15-member council oversees measures that ensure the maintenance of international peace and security. The Security Council determines if a threat exists and encourages the parties involved to settle it peacefully.
Economic and Social Council: The Economic and Social Council makes policies and recommendations regarding economic, social and environmental issues. It consists of 54 members who are elected by the General Assembly for three-year terms.
Trusteeship Council: The Trusteeship Council was originally created to supervise the 11 Trust Territories that were placed under the management of seven member states. By 1994, all the territories had gained self-government or independence, and the body was suspended. But that same year, the Council decided to continue meeting occasionally, instead of annually.
International Court of Justice: This branch is responsible for settling legal disputes submitted by the states and answering questions in accordance with international law.
Secretariat: The Secretariat is made up of the Secretary-General and thousands of U.N. staffers. Its members carry out the daily duties of the U.N. and work on international peacekeeping missions.

U.N. Successes

Since its inception, the United Nations has performed numerous humanitarian, environmental and peace-keeping undertakings, including:

• Providing food to 90 million people in over 75 countries
• Assisting more than 34 million refugees
• Authorizing 71 international peacekeeping missions
• Working with 140 nations to minimize climate change
• Assisting about 50 countries per year with their elections
• Providing vaccinations for 58 percent of children in the world
• Helping about 30 million women a year with maternal health efforts
• Protecting human rights with 80 treaties and declarations

The annual UN Peacekeeping budget is less than 0.5% of global military spending. The UN currently has 117,000 peacekeepers helping keep peace in 15 operations on 4 continents.

UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) provides food and assistance to 80 million people in some 80 countries.

UN and its agencies help over 1 million women a month overcome pregnancy complications.

UN and its agencies supply vaccines to 45% of the world’s children

UN supports about 67 countries a year with their elections. The UN also uses diplomacy to prevent conflict.

UN assists people displaced by violence, conflict, and persecution.

U N Reform

Fortunately, there is plenty to motivate world leaders to do what it takes. Indeed, the UN has had two major recent triumphs, with two more on the way before the end of this year.
The first triumph is the nuclear agreement with Iran. Sometimes misinterpreted as an agreement between Iran and the United States, the accord is in fact between Iran and the UN, represented by the five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the US), plus Germany. An Iranian diplomat, in explaining why his country will scrupulously honor the agreement, made the point vividly: “Do you really think that Iran would dare to cheat on the very five UN Security Council permanent members that can seal our country’s fate?”
The second big triumph is the successful conclusion, after 15 years, of the Millennium Development Goals, which have underpinned the largest, longest, and most effective global poverty-reduction effort ever undertaken. Two UN Secretaries-General have overseen the MDGs: Kofi Annan, who introduced them in 2000, and Ban Ki-moon, who, since succeeding Annan at the start of 2007, has led vigorously and effectively to achieve them.

The never-ending quest for reform, for improving the functioning of the United Nations, has been an integral part of the life of the world body since its earliest days. Indeed, one of the more controversial issues at the United Nations’ founding conference in San Francisco during the spring of 1945 was how the process of amending its Charter should be structured and when a general review conference of the Charter’s provisions should be called. Those delegations unhappy with some of the compromises reached in San Francisco, especially concerning the inequities of the veto power granted the “Big Five” Permanent Members of the Security Council (P-5), wanted to schedule a general review relatively soon and to make the hurdles to amendment relatively low. The Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, the other “Big Five” powers, on the other hand, naturally preferred to keep the barriers to Charter change relatively high.

Through the years, scores of independent commissions, governmental studies, and individual scholars have put forward literally hundreds of proposals aimed at making the world body work better, decide more fairly, modify its mandate, or operate more efficiently. Not to be left behind by the reform bandwagon, successive Secretaries-General and units of the Secretariat have engaged in frequent, if episodic, bouts of self-examination and self-criticism, offering their own reform agendas. What explains this apparently irresistible impulse for reforming the United Nations? Six factors suggest themselves:

What are natural impulses of U N Reform

Public institutions depend on recurring processes of criticism, reassessment, change, and renewal to retain their relevance and vitality. Reform is a sign of institutional health and dynamism, not a penalty for bad behavior.

Highly complex, decentralized, and multi-faceted institutions, like the UN system, offer more targets for criticism and more opportunities for change. The temptation to tinker with the United Nations is only magnified by its high visibility, symbolic aura, and broad agenda.

The diversity of the United Nations’ membership and the ambitious nature of its mandates make it highly likely that some constituencies will be seriously disappointed with its power-sharing arrangements and/or its accomplishments at any point in time. Persistent disappointment or feelings of disenfranchisement have often led to calls for reform.

 As the world changes, so do the politics of the United Nations and the priorities of its Member States. In looking to the United Nations to fulfill new mandates that exceed its capacities, influential non-governmental groups often look to structural innovations or to the creation of new bodies to close the gap between expectations and capabilities. In both cases, proposals for reform usually follow.

Critics keep calling for reform, in part, because the United Nations has been so slow in delivering it. As the major powers hoped in San Francisco, formal institutional and structural reforms have proven hard to achieve in the UN system. The concerns about UN management and finance voiced by Congress in the late 1940s, moreover, were echoed, a half-century later, in the late 1990s.

The universality of the United Nations has fueled a dual pattern on the intergovernmental level: frequent calls for change by one Member State or group or another, followed by blocking moves by others with divergent interests or perspectives. At times, it seems as if every Member State is in favor of some sort of reform, but their individual notions of what this should entail differ so markedly as to make consensus on the direction reform should take hard to achieve.

increase in funding, with high-income countries contributing at least $40 per capita annually, upper middle-income countries giving $8, lower-middle-income countries $2, and low-income countries $1. With these contributions – which amount to roughly 0.1% of the group’s average per capita income – the UN would have about $75 billion annually with which to strengthen the quality and reach of vital programs, beginning with those needed to achieve the SDGs. Once the world is on a robust path to achieve the SDGs, the need for, say, peacekeeping and emergency-relief operations should decline as conflicts diminish in number and scale, and natural disasters are better prevented or anticipated.
This brings us to the second major area of reform: ensuring that the UN is fit for the new age of sustainable development. Specifically, the UN needs to strengthen its expertise in areas such as ocean health, renewable energy systems, urban design, disease control, technological innovation, public-private partnerships, and peaceful cultural cooperation. Some UN programs should be merged or closed, while other new SDG-related UN programs should be created.
The third major reform imperative is the UN’s governance, starting with the Security Council, the composition of which no longer reflects global geopolitical realities. Indeed, the Western Europe and Other Group (WEOG) now accounts for three of the five permanent members (France, the United Kingdom, and the US). That leaves only one permanent position for the Eastern European Group (Russia), one for the Asia-Pacific Group (China), and none for Africa or Latin America.
The rotating seats on the Security Council do not adequately restore regional balance. Even with two of the ten rotating Security Council seats, the Asia-Pacific region is still massively under-represented. The Asia-Pacific region accounts for roughly 55% of the world’s population and 44% of its annual income but has just 20% (three out of 15) of the seats on the Security Council.