UNO

UNO (United Nations Organization, or UN) After the failure of the League of Nations to prevent the crises of the 1930s which culminated in World War II, the major Allied countries (the USSR, China, the UK, and the USA) agreed in Moscow (October 1943) to create a new, improved international peacekeeping organization after the war. Following further negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta, the charter of the UN was discussed and drafted in San Francisco in spring 1945, and signed by 51 nations on 26 June 1945. Its administration is headed by a Secretary-General, a post which has been filled by Lie (1946–52), Hammarskjöld (1953–61), U Thant (1961–71), Waldheim (1972–81), Pérez de Cuéllar (1982–91), Boutros Ghali (1992–7), and Annan (1997– ). In contrast to the League, its membership included the major world powers (though the People's Republic of China was not admitted until 1971).

It has a stronger executive, the Security Council, which consists of five permanent members (USSR/Russia, China (Taiwan until 1971, then the People's Republic), France, the UK, the USA), each of whom has a right to veto any decision which the council may take, and ten temporary members which are elected for two years. As a result of the right of veto, the Council was relatively ineffective during the Cold War, when unanimity was difficult to establish between the USA and the USSR. For example, the UN could only intervene in the Korean War because of a temporary Soviet boycott of the Council which made it impossible for the USSR to exercise the veto.

In addition to the Council, there is a General Assembly which consists of all member states, each of which has one vote. It can debate any issue which concerns the UN charter. Resolutions need a simple majority except for constitutional matters, which need a two-thirds majority. Its resolutions on international security are binding, but not its ‘recommendations’ to individual states, for example its hostility against apartheid in South Africa. Owing to the process of decolonization, the Assembly's character has changed substantially not only in size (its membership had climbed to 191 countries in 2002) but also in quality, as a disproportionate number of the new states that have been admitted since 1945 are less developed countries in Africa and Asia, so that the relative influence of the industrialized countries in the Assembly has diminished. Other principal organs are the Economic and Social Council, which investigates issues such as population growth, human rights, drugs, and women's rights, and the International Court of Justice. There are also a host of specialized agencies (e.g. UNESCO, IMF, WHO) which are autonomous relative to the UN, but which have the same goal of international peace and justice. Despite its original aim, the UN was never able to develop an armed force of its own, so that in its military interventions it has always relied on troops supplied by individual member states. This has reduced its scope for independent action, so that its greatest successes have been in the arbitration and supervision of peace agreements, such as in the Middle East from 1947, Kashmir (1948/9), Cyprus (since 1964), and the Iran–Iraq War (1980–8).

The record of the UN's larger-scale military interventions has been rather mixed, as these depended mostly on the political will of the countries who supplied the military forces and finance. Hence, its successes in the Korean War (1950–3), the Gulf War (1990–1), and Haiti (1994–5) were founded on US military strength. By the same token, such missions have often destroyed the UN's impartial reputation and this, together with an ultimate lack of military resolve, was the main reason for the UN's failures in Somalia (1992–4) and the Bosnian Civil War.

Hopes for a more effective UN following the end of the Cold War have been dashed, largely because the collapse of the Soviet Union fundamentally diminished the rivalry between the superpowers and their willingness to accept neutral, multilateral intervention. This eroded the resolve of the USA and other countries to give financial and military support to UN activities, at a time when the UN was engaged in more missions than ever before. Under the leadership of Kofi Annan, however, the UN's reputation recovered somewhat. Annan was able to point to some genuine successes beyond peacekeeping, notably in assisting the establishment of civilian institutions which in the case of East Timor enabled that territory to proclaim independence in 2002. In 2001, Annan and the UN were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

http://www.un.org

human rights

Table 21. Secretaries‐General of the United Nations Organization

Trygve Lie	1946–52
Dag Hammarskjöld	1953–61
U Thant	1961–71
Kurt Waldheim	1972–81
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar	1982–91
Boutros Boutros Ghali	1992–97
Kofi Annan	1997–