Barring a cataclysmic event, such as a nuclear war, I have no doubt that the UN will survive the next 25 years. Survival, though, is a minimalist concept (the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon survived eight years in coma). More than survival, the question is effectiveness. Will the compelling concept of multilateralism become relevant again? Or will the counter-narrative prevail: America first, Russia first, China first, Turkey first, Brazil first or whoever first.
Today’s challenges are complex, integrated and global. Yet, forces are gaining around the world, whose responses are simplistic, reckless and parochial. And whose protagonists are intolerant, authoritarian and nationalistic. Their precursors of the first-half of the twentieth century were the challenge, and the establishment of the UN the response.
The UN emerged as a utopian project out of the catastrophe of World War II, the second global inferno within the space of a generation. In the 1920s and 1930s, the opportunity was missed to organize peace: Japan invaded Manchuria, Italy Abyssinia and Germany Czechoslovakia. Germany then ignited a global conflagration and carried out the genocide against the Jews. A new chapter in world history was to begin.
The idealistic vision was stunning, namely that states would cooperate, regardless how big, powerful, rich – or the opposite – they were. President Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasized that the creation of the United Nations heralded the end of a world order of unilateralism, military alliances, spheres of influence and other instruments, that had existed for centuries. His successor, Harry Truman, stressed that the rights of all people on Earth would be protected by the United Nations and that it was the responsibility of powerful countries to serve the world, instead of dominating it.
In 1945, the UN Charter was ratified by the US Senate by an overwhelming vote (89 to 2). It would not be today, and it would also be virtually impossible to convince the nearly 200 countries of the world (up from 51 in 1945) again to draft a Charter for world security and human progress. The sheer number of countries, their differing capacities, economies, interests and politics would not allow it.
I note thus with a sense of awe and nostalgia that the post-World War II peace was based on cooperation, not only among friends, but also among rivals and former enemies. Unlike ever before in human history (excepting perhaps the treatment of France at the Congress of Vienna in 1815), the victors did not seek revenge and thus did not plant the seeds for the next war. One cannot emphasize too strongly the extraordinary idea behind the establishment of the United Nations: Cooperation. The UN was conceived as the institutionalized, ongoing cooperation of all the world’s states that would be confidence-building and reduce the anarchy in the international system.
But, 75 years on, that vision has faded. Legal norms are waning, and power politics are ascending. “The jungle is growing back,” as Robert Kagan observes.