International Politics

What Do You Really Think the United Nations Can Do About All this, Anyway?

It wasn’t designed to deal with this sort of thing. On purpose.

The city of L’viv finds itself in the news these days. I’ve never been but I know that it was called Lemberg when my maternal grandfather was born there in the middle of World War I in 1915. At that point, it was in the Austro-Hungarian empire but when that empire was dismembered after the war, both he and Lemberg found themselves in Poland in a city renamed L’vov. In 1939 that same Poland was divided between its German and Soviet invaders and by 1942 he was an ethnic German (who had never been to Germany), fighting with the Wehrmacht in Italy. He survived, but the undiagnosed PTSD that he came out of there with made the rest of his life difficult.

He never saw Lemberg again and there was no international organization that could have changed his circumstances before, during, or after the war.

And there isn’t one now either, a century later, that can do anything to change the fate of the citizens of that or any other Ukrainian city. If the Russians are going to destroy it, we will watch it happen. To do otherwise would provoke a wider war, we are told.

Maybe so.

We’d be right to ask then, what is the point of the United Nations, if not to put a stop to this kind of madness when and where it happens? But a better question might be, if not for this, then for what reasons does the UN exist? Or, has the UN ever stated that its goal was to stop war? I don’t mean that in any nefarious way, in that there is some dark reason that the UN is happy to let wars proceed unabated. I mean that the United Nations from the start was never set up with the intention of ending war.

Indeed, this was the goal of its interwar predecessor, the League of Nations. It has been argued that World War II started partly because of the way that World War I ended, but we can conclude from that the fact that there was another war that the League failed in reaching its stated goals.

There were many reasons for that. Though it was the idea of American President Woodrow Wilson, the US Congress rejected American participation in favor of a policy of isolationism. Without the US on board, the idealist project would have to contend with the short-sighted realism of the British and French in keeping Germany crippled, which we see now but only a few warned then, would guarantee a German response eventually. Additionally, the lofty virtues of internationalism did not spread throughout the world as hoped and nationalism remained a force. Self-determination was granted to select national groups, but vast areas of the world remained under European imperial control. Finally, the global economic disaster of the 1930s eventually rendered the League completely ineffective as countries pursued their own interests ahead of world peace.

But it was a good idea, though probably ahead of its time. So it wasn’t scrapped completely and was tried again after World War II, in the form of the United Nations. Today it seems like it may still be either ahead of its time or way behind it. Whether its time will ever arrive still remains to be seen.

The first order of business in 1945 at the San Francisco Conference was to lower the unattainable bar in terms of the goals. Instead of trying to achieve the impossible, the mission became to address the underlying causes of war and how those causes impact the expectations for a quality of life that the concept of human rights tells us that everyone is entitled to.

Thus, there are many organizations within the UN that do just that.

We’ve become more familiar with the World Health Organisation in the past two years. Most people have heard of UNESCO or the World Food Program. The International Seabed Authority is working on developing international standards and regulations for the exploration of the ocean floor. These are but a few examples.

Casual observers know about the General Assembly. In it, all nations are equal and each gets a vote. Therefore, it has no real power to react swiftly to world events with anything stronger than condemnations of aggression.

The real power is not in the General Assembly and this is purposely so. The victors of World War II wanted to make sure that the balance of power was not in the hands of small, inconsequential nations, especially as independence from colonial rule could already be seen on the horizon.

So the Security Council was created by, for, and with the five victors of the war as permanent members and ten rotating non-permanent members along for the ride. The United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the Republic of China filled the five permanent seats and crucially, gave themselves veto power. Any resolution was required to be unanimous and the Big 5 could use their veto as they saw fit.

Other victors — Canada, Australia, India, Denmark, Belgium, for example, were not included in this, other than as temporary members, if and when their time came.

The makeup of the membership reflected the geopolitical reality of 1945. Eighty years later, things have changed drastically. The British and the French postwar empires were still intact in 1945 but would dissolve to varying degrees within the next 20–30 years. The Chinese seat went to the People’s Republic in 1971. The US and Russia (occupying the USSR’s seat) remain in conflict. That part hasn’t changed.

There have been many instances when the Security Council has acted unanimously. Indeed, it has passed a total of 2619 resolutions and the one that demanded the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait in 1991 is one of the better-known examples.

But what is to be done when a permanent member of the Security Council — that is charged with ensuring global peace and security — is an aggressor and uses its veto the way Russia most recently has, and the way the US has far more than anyone else since 1970? Then there is no resolution forthcoming. The Security Council is powerless to act.

So, is the UN a failure? No. It can be argued that the standard of living for the vast majority of people in the world has improved in the nearly 80 years of its existence. Surely, the UN deserves some of the credit for that.

It is clear by now that the UN cannot stop war, though that was never its stated goal. Can it stop genocide? The answer to that is clearly no as well. There are countless examples over the decades as well as from the present day, beyond Ukraine. Rwanda and Bosnia are not that distant in our collective memories and the Rohingya are facing the same fate in Myanmar today.

To prevent genocide requires the ability and will to take action and that action requires a military force. Where is such a force going to come from without escalating the conflict further?

It certainly is imperfect but we cannot scrap the United Nations, since it might just be all we have. However, it is past time for an overhaul, since the world has changed dramatically since 1945 and even more so in the last decade alone.

The current setup is not up to the task of ensuring stability for everyone in the world. That has been proven countless times even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The key element that needs to be addressed is the membership of the Security Council. But for that to happen, it will need agreement from the five permanent members that the kind of change that will check their power is necessary. Surely, this is an impossible task, given that turkeys never vote for Thanksgiving.

The Big 5 won the war, yes, albeit not without help from smaller nations. But that was nearly 80 years ago now. Circumstances have changed and certainly, alliances have as well. There are also far more countries in the world than there were then. Where is their voice in all this?

If Ukraine somehow is able to survive this onslaught intact or otherwise, it will be the UN’s job to help it rebuild, no question. But until then, it will not play a role in the events on the ground in that country.

It was not set up, in the first place and so nobody is coming to save L’viv, L’vov, L’wow, or Lemberg. Not then and not now.

If you like what you are reading here and want unlimited access to thousands of writers, please consider a subscription to Medium. It will set you back a fiver a month and if you use this link, then I get a slice of that. It will not be used toward a trip to the General Assembly in New York, I promise.