The United Nations faces serious problems: it has a hide-bound organizational edifice in which, for example, there are overlapping agencies for development and humanitarian assistance; a patronage system that allows member states to appoint supporters and hence encourages incompetence and waste; inadequate financial discipline; and an often indistinct vision. Its record of past successes, such as ending apartheid in South Africa, moderating the nuclear arms race, instituting democracy in El Salvador and Haiti, and bringing peace to Guatemala and Angola, has been tarnished by such persistent bureaucratic and political defects. Indeed, the organization's vexing and long-running fiscal and political crises have for the first time raised questions about its ability to survive into the next millennium.
Recent efforts to assess and fix its flaws have come up against serious impediments, not least of which is bureaucratic inertia. But a good many of the United Nations' shortcomings are rooted in its beginnings, at the San Francisco Conference of 1945. That remarkable event shadows and marks the United Nations, for good or ill, over a half-century later.
Most Americans, much less most foreigners, and even many U.N. delegates, have little knowledge, or at best a distorted sense, of the basic elements that went into shaping the U.N.'s basic architecture at San Francisco. Such ignorance complicates any realistic attempt to make significant reforms in the organization today. It is also why the most recent U.S. proposal for the payment of America's past dues (over $1 billion), one that comes with many conditions, has raised hackles inside the United Nations. In order to better understand why the United Nations is in such bad shape today and how it must eventually be reformed, it is first necessary to identify some of the most prevalent current myths surrounding the U.N.'s creation. I count ten major misconceptions that tend to blur the vision of even the most intelligent and sophisticated observers of the organization.
Born in Controversy
The first misconception is - to the extent that people remember San Francisco at all - the belief that it was a conference unencumbered by controversy. Actually, quite the opposite was the case. The conference opened in heated argument - the Soviets opposing an American as chairman - and ended as the Cold War was beginning to heat up. The U.N.'s birth was, in fact, a very difficult one, and the baby was nearly stillborn. Throughout the two-month affair (April-June 1945), there were significant conflicts over matters that today may seem surprising in their intensity but which at the time galvanized the participants: such issues as the admission to the United Nations of then pro-Nazi Argentina or the Soviet-controlled nations of Poland, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine (which would have given Stalin extra votes); how much authority the United Nations was to have over the process of decolonization; whether regional organizations like the Organization of American States (OAS) could play a role in handling local crises before they went to the United Nations; whether the veto power of the five permanent members of the Security Council would extend not only to action but to the discussion of issues; and the more fundamental question of whether the veto should exist at all. At times, these squabbles nearly crippled the conference.
A second misconception about San Francisco holds that this was a conclave of collegial friends, bound together by common democratic ideals and a burning idealism, intent on setting up a world body to promote collective security. Certainly this was among the motivating factors that brought 46 nations together in San Francisco. But in fact there was also a desire to settle long-festering grievances about border demarcations and colonial possessions and to gain further political power at the expense of ancient adversaries. Every national delegation carried with it its own historic baggage: age-old enmities, preoccupations over national honor, and seething ethnic and religious tensions. Washington, for its part, feared that the traditional obsessions and domestic passions of the participants might interfere with its ample vision for the United Nations.
However, the American government had an edge. In the months leading up to the conference, it had intercepted diplomatic cables from almost all the countries coming to San Francisco. It knew in advance the negotiating positions of practically every delegation except for those of Britain and the Soviet Union. In addition, during the assembly itself, American FBI agents saturated San Francisco, and FBI wiretaps picked up the conversations of delegates. This is not to say that Soviet intelligence agents and spies from other powers were not also active, just less ubiquitous.
Immaculate Conception
We come next to one of the more persistent myths among the general public - that the United Nations was born out of a dreamy, gentle, idealistic vision of a global body, a sort of immaculate conception. In fact, the U.N. Charter was a meticulously crafted, power-oriented document carefully molded by hard-nosed drafters to conform to the global realities of 1945. Engineered primarily by the four major victorious wartime allies - the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China - it started with the premise that the organization had to be welded tightly to security issues and, only secondarily, to economic and social issues. It was configured so that this quartet of strong nations - the so-called Big Four, which when later joined by France became the "Big Five" - were given the tools, including the veto, to prevent future wars, especially another global conflict. The most destructive war in the history of mankind was just winding down - only 30 years after the world had endured an almost equally horrendous ordeal - and the exhausted nations that were represented in San Francisco were determined to deter another such conflict. Hence, the blueprint for the United Nations was the product neither of naivete nor credulousness.
Another illusion on the part of many people is that the United Nations was organized on the basis of democratic principles. In truth, the United Nations was never intended to be representative of peoples but of sovereign states. The governments of these states may or may not be the products of free elections. This does not mean the United Nations is antidemocratic, only that its non-binding resolutions represent the opinion of peoples as expressed through their governments. Through debate in the Security Council and votes in the General Assembly, member states can express the moral outrage of their citizens over all sorts of earthly misbehavior. But, in the end, it is the five permanent members that decide issues of peace and war - and, I might add, determine who is secretary general and what amendments are made to the U.N. Charter. None of the other 180 member nations - either individually or as members of the General Assembly - possess those prerogatives.
The Vital Veto
We come to the next misconception - namely, that the veto power held by the Big Five, which gives five capitals the ability to decide on U.N. intervention, determine who leads the organization, block U.N. Charter amendments, and so forth, is simply too potent a weapon to be wielded by so few and should be abolished. The truth is that the veto is as vital to the operation of the United Nations today as it was to the founding of the organization in 1945. Fifty years ago, the United States and its four allies made it clear that they would not participate in such a global organization unless they possessed that power. In Washington's thinking the demise of the earlier League of Nations was attributable to the failure of its organizers to restrict the veto to the leading powers of the day.
And, realistically speaking, if efforts to maintain world peace are to be effective, the leading powers must cooperate, or at least refrain from opposition. There is no doubt that in situations where even one leading power is party to a conflict the United Nations is in no position to act. On the contrary, a show of authority in such circumstances would only lead to a breakup of the organization. Hence, as Yale scholar Jean Krasno has observed, while the veto is surely not democratic, it keeps the big players in the game, and there is no game without them. The reluctant acquiescence by the lesser powers to the veto at San Francisco was an acknowledgment of this reality.
The Chief Patron
Another myth - that America was simply one among several major players in San Francisco - also complicates thinking about U.N. reform. The United States was in truth the chief patron of the United Nations. Franklin Roosevelt had begun thinking seriously about the need for such a world organization early in the war. The U.S. State Department drafted the original U.N. Charter. Washington had to pressure Churchill and Stalin, neither of whom was terribly enthusiastic about the idea of a world organization, into supporting it, and it made certain that the 1945 conference was held on American soil. The United States airlifted many delegations from war-devastated countries abroad to San Francisco in its own military planes; it paid the flail cost of the two-month meeting; and, as the most powerful country on earth in 1945, possessing the most potent military force in history, it freely exercised economic and military muscle to get its way on most issues.
Conservative Republicans today charge that the United Nations was primarily the outgrowth of the obsessive internationalism of the American Democratic Party. This is another misconception about the U.N.'s founding, which, from the American perspective, was a bipartisan enterprise. President Roosevelt, remembering how Republican isolationists had led the successful fight against the League of Nations in the U.S. Senate in 1920, insisted that Republicans be part of the planning process from the beginning, starting with the State Department's charter deliberations in 1942 and extending to full participation by the opposition party in the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco Conference. Among these delegates were such Republican stalwarts as Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, Gov. Harold Stassen of Minnesota, and John Foster Dulles, later to become secretary of state under Dwight Eisenhower. All strongly embraced the concept of the United Nations. Such deep Republican involvement guaranteed that the United Nations would escape the fate of the League of Nations, and in 1945 the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly ratified the U.N. Charter.
Once the United Nations was established, there arose the question of how it was to enforce its authority. Another popular myth was that the decisions of the General Assembly were to be binding on member states, especially when the permanent members of the Security Council were in agreement on a particular issue. But the decisions of the General Assembly were not - and are not - binding on members as a matter of international law. Moreover, while decisions of the Security Council, which has primary responsibility for the U.N.'s activities with respect to maintaining peace and security, were intended to be binding on all member states, they are not so in fact.
The U.N. Charter makes clear that the General Assembly can only offer "recommendations" to the world community. Majority rule, it was recognized from the outset, could never work in the General Assembly as it might work in a national parliament or legislature. The obligatory acceptance by all nations of U.N. decisions would have run up against the concept of national sovereignty. National governments could not tolerate major assaults on their interests and, if pushed, would likely refuse to play by the rules. Thus the General Assembly's decisions had to rest on the will of its members to carry them out.
However, under the U.N. Charter, the decisions of the 15-member Security Council require compliance by all member nations. But the Security Council has no independent means to enforce its will. No nation, for example, ever signed the "Article 43" agreements that were intended to provide the United Nations with a military capacity to execute Security Council decisions. The Security Council can apply pressure on dissenting nations through its edicts, but they are not always enforceable - except through moral suasion. Moral pressure can often be brought to bear effectively - but not always. In any event, it is quite clear that the United Nations cannot act like a world government.
What has sometimes given the United Nations more leverage is its relationship with regional security organizations. Regional groups are supposed to act in crises before the United Nations becomes involved, according to the U.N. Charter. But it is a misconception to think that the United Nations originally acknowledged regional bodies as partners. Washington at first resisted sanctioning these groupings, believing that regional entities would dilute the U.N.'s authority. However, the Latin American delegates at San Francisco, seeking recognition for their own inter-American regional security pact, threatened a revolt unless they got legal acceptance for their body, later known as the OAS. Eventually, under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, it was agreed that "nothing...shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense."
This provision cleared the way for such regional security organizations as NATO, SE^TO, and the Warsaw Pact. While the growth of regional organizations did take away some of the U.N.'s authority, it also spared an overburdened United Nations from having to commit resources to local crises.
The Biggest Misconception
The final myth worth exploding is that the United Nations has never taken happily to internal reform, that it is an inflexible institution set in its ways and unwilling to change. This critique is particularly wide of the mark.
The U.N. Charter itself provided for a second constitutional convention after ten years, the founding fathers being well aware that an institution conceived on the ruins of war might require alteration a decade later. Although another convention was never held, the United Nations did change in many ways. For example, when the Cold War stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union developed in the Security Council, the organization found inventive paths around the deadlock to achieve its broader goals: the secretary general took over the role as international mediator; the Trusteeship Council oversaw decolonization; the notion of peacekeeping, a concept never mentioned in the U.N. Charter, was authorized; and the General Assembly, despite its often heated rhetoric, became a genuine deliberative body and acquired increased moral authority. The application of this moral authority could be seen, for example, in the imposition of U.N. sanctions against South Africa, which contributed to the collapse of apartheid. And it has been applied generally to advance the cause of human rights around the world. Moreover, during the most dangerous years of the Cold War, the United Nations, by providing a place for the major powers to debate their differences, to negotiate deals, even to scapegoat the organization, helped prevent the outbreak of catastrophic nuclear war.
The General Assembly also employed imaginative and resourceful methods to get around its inherent inability to legislate the behavior of its members. It did so, for example, by codifying international standards, most recently with respect to nuclear arms testing guidelines, and then seeking ratification of the covering agreements by individual member states. This process often took an enormous amount of time, and compliance was not always assured. But members that may have not participated in such agreements at the outset often joined later on as global pressure to do so built and the desire to be involved set in.
This complicated process worked better than expected. The United Nations has issued dozens of declarations, resolutions, and conventions on the enforcement of human rights and press freedoms that have been ratified around the world. It has negotiated over 300 international treaties on such more mundane matters as airline routes, nuclear energy inspections, and pollution controls, and in dozens of other areas that are critical to the functioning of a well-balanced international system.
The United Nations has also acted in ways unanticipated in its charter - most recently by convening international conferences on women's rights, human rights, the protection of children, environmental degradation, and poverty, all of which have broadened the international consensus on civilized norms. By coordinating its activities with those of nongovernmental organizations, as it did, for example, in June 1996 when it invited nongovernmental organizations to participate in the Habitat II Conference on Cities in Istanbul, it has strengthened its constituent base. It has achieved notable successes through innovative responses to human suffering. The vaccines distributed through UNICEF have saved the lives of millions of children. The World Health Organization has eliminated smallpox and today is seeking to wipe out polio by the year 2000. The World Food Program feeds millions of hungry people annually (in 1994, for example, it fed some 57 million) - and continually enlarges its workload.
The Central Role of Power Politics
By dispelling the persistent myths about the founding and history of the United Nations, we should gain a clearer vision of the world organization around which the demands for reform (particularly from Washington) have arisen. What we can see is an organization that was born of and remains subject to politics. It is, moreover, an organization chronically torn by divisions between North and South as well as between dictatorships and democracies, in which the United States and, by extension, its two preeminent political parties, remains the major player. As a body its authority is moral, political, and economic rather than coercive. But it is a body that adjusts well to changing conditions and is capable of acting swiftly and decisively on occasion - albeit sometimes indirectly - and one that shows surprising durability.
Many Americans today are hoping that the new U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan, will implement the latest U.S. demands for change as called for in the congressional legislation put forward in June in the promised overhaul of the U.N. bureaucracy. He will have some task. Due to the influence of Republican conservatives, Congress approved payment of only $819 million of the over $1 billion the United States owes the organization in unpaid dues. Moreover, the legislation set forth some 38 conditions to be met before the United States will pay its arrears. These range from the cosmic (the United Nations shall not violate the U.S. Constitution or impose taxes) to the nuts and bolts (the U.S. share of dues for the general operating budget is to be cut in the future from 25 percent to 20 percent) to the mundane (the United States will cut aid to nations whose U.N. diplomats do not pay New York City parking tickets) to the entirely gratuitous (the United States will no longer help fund U.N. global conferences).
This overall approach to instructing the United Nations on its operations, while certainly hamfisted, is entirely consistent with how the United States has viewed its role in running the organization ever since it took the lead in creating the body 52 years ago. In terms of the United Nations, at least, it still sees itself as the "indispensable nation."
With the end of the Cold War, as more and more nations turn toward democratic systems of governance and as the number of prosperous states increases the United States should ostensibly have less control over the United Nations. In fact, the United States has begun to recognize some of these new realities by recommending the appointment of five new permanent members to the Security Council (Germany, Japan, and three developing nations to be chosen by rotation) - though without indicating whether these countries should have the veto - as well as an increase in the number of nonpermanent members.
But as the Gulf War and Bosnia proved, successful U.N. operations still require America's backing. Hence, while there may be considerable grumbling over Washington's high-handed dictates in this latest bill, there is likely to be an attempt to satisfy its demands.
Indeed, that is the nub of the problem: the practice of power politics still overwhelms the United Nations - to the detriment of a more rational mode of operation. Changing the United Nations may be necessary, but it is likely to be a good deal more difficult than one might suspect.
Stephen Schlesinger is director of the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research and acting publisher of the World Policy Journal. He is currently writing a book on the 1945 San Francisco Conference that founded the United Nations.
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