THEMATIC FOCUS

A variety of internal and external factors contribute to state formation, expansion, and decline. Governments maintain order through a variety of administrative institutions, policies, and procedures, and governments obtain, retain, and exercise power in different ways and for different purposes.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Explain how and why globalization changed international interactions among states.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS

KC-6.3.II.A New international organizations, including the United Nations, formed with the stated goal of maintaining world peace and facilitating international cooperation.

§ Limitations of the United Nations

• Goals

  • • The UN was a high-minded project that came form the inventive mind of Franklin Roosevelt as a global police force that would help prevent wars of aggression and genocide.

    • superseded the League of Nations (1920–1946)

    • the UN does not legislate

      • • representatives of the vast majority of the world’s countries have a voice and a vote in shaping the international community of nations

    • The charter establishing the United Nations in 1945, fifty member nations pledged to achieve “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights, and fundamental freedoms.”

    • Also under its charter a principal purpose of the UN is “to maintain international peace and security”

• What it became

  • • provided a prestigious platform from which to conduct anti-colonial agitation after WWII

    • place where developing nations could make their weight felt in international organizations on everything from trade issues, environmental issues, sovereignty, and membership in the United Nations Security Council

    • World Health Organization and the UN Fund for Population Activities to aid countries in organizing and promoting family-planning programs

    • Contentious issues have sometimes paralyzed the UN and its affiliated organizations, because societies at different stages of economic development have pursued sometimes conflicting social and political goals

• Shortcomings:

  • • 1950, the Korean War

      • • Thanks to a Russian decision to boycott proceedings the UN approved intervention in Korea

        • North Korea is, then, as much a product of the international community’s failures as anything else

        • the threat North Korea poses to its neighbours is perfectly clear, but the UN is, once again, powerless to act

          • • partly because of reluctance on the part of China to deal with its turbulent ally

            • partly because neither China not anyone else has that much leverage over the decisions of Kim Jong-un

            • The UN is powerless because although North Korea has developed nuclear weapons against international treaty obligations, it hasn’t yet launched them at anyone

    • 1990s -- it proved itself inadequate to the job, and things have not improved since

      • • Rwanda 1994

          • • failure of UN forces sent into Rwanda to stop the genocide

        • Bosnian Serb forces after the siege of Srebrenica, when the mass murder of 8,000 Muslim men and boys was committed after Dutch UN peacekeepers were unable to hold the line.

    • 2010s -- the UN has proved irrelevant over Syria, North Korea, and Ukraine

      • • Syria -- UK, Australia, Denmark, Russia and America all operated in Syria, but without reference to the UN’s policy

          • • Survivors of the Syrian Civil War and ISIS fled across Europe, creating the largest movement of refugees there since the end of the Second World War

        • Syria is a UN member state and its President ordered mustard gas to be dropped on his country, yet the case for humanitarian intervention, while it may seem obvious, does not easily fall within the UN’s 1945 Charter.

          • • Even if it did, it would need the permanent members of the Security Council, the notoriously fractious body of American, French, Russian, British and Chinese diplomats and governments, to agree on what to do.

        • Ukraine -- invaded by Russia

          • • displays the UN's failure at its purest

            • There are no messy moral issues here, no uncertainty about weapons of mass destruction, no questions about the reliability of intelligence or doubts about the international mood.

            • President Putin committed an old-fashioned act of naked aggression against a neighbour right out of the 1930s playbook.

              • • it was in clear breach of quite a proportion of the clauses of the UN Charter that the then USSR was a founding signatory to

                • the consequences for Russia have been negligible

    • Today --Chinese and Russians, as ever looking to their own backyard of human rights abuses and internal secessionist movements, aren’t keen on blessing multinational invasions of other nations.

      • • the UN is unable to do anything about that, even if the vast majority of its 193 members want it to

    • other general failures of the UN

      • • various nuclear or chemical weapons programmes of Pakistan

        • apartheid-era South Africa (though a suspended UN member admittedly)

        • Israel -- Arab-Israel conflicts and the issue of Palestine

        • Saddam Hussein gassing of his own people and murder of the Marsh Arabs and Kurds

        • George W Bush and Tony Blair's invasion of Iraq (2003)

Activity

1.) Create a list of reasons/historical context that explains the creation of the United Nations

2.) Use the document below to identify the stated reasons for creating the United Nations

Source: Preamble to the United Nations Charter, 1945

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

•to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

•to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

•to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

•to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

AND FOR THESE ENDS

•to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and

•to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and

•to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force

shall not be used, save in the common interest, and

•to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement

of all peoples,

HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS

Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

Activity

1.) What are the limitations identified by former UNHCR chief Sadako Ogata.

2.) Identify the events in the 1990s that former UNHCR chief Sadako Ogata would be referencing in her analysis.

Source: former UNHCR chief Sadako Ogata. The former High Commissioner made these comments at a panel discussion in Geneva to launch her new book, “The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the refugee crises of the 1990s” (W.W. Norton and Company, 2005).

There are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems

...

UNHCR is a protection agency. But what does protection really mean during conflicts, when states can’t provide protection for their citizens?

...

Military intervention in humanitarian situations has to be the last resort. I would prefer to see more effective preventive action and political action to be mobilised.

...

I’m not convinced the world is committed enough to prevent another genocide

...

I don’t think we solved the problem, but we made a difference. I hope UNHCR can continue to be at the forefront of humanitarian intervention

Key Takeaways

A.) Organizations such as the United Nations, formed with the stated goal of maintaining world peace and facilitating international cooperation, were created in the wake of World War II.

B.) Limitations of such organizations has led to continued ineffectiveness, similar to that of its predecessor, the League of Nations (1920–1946) .