Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of The United Nations
One of the goals of The Transformational Moment: Global Reset and the Future of Hope invitation is to lay the foundation for a post-pandemic world in which human self-interest aligns with planetary realities. We need not a partial but a full transformation.
Such a global re-set can produce universal benefits in the form of a healthier, more just, safer, kinder and more spirituality connected society.
One of the most important vehicles for achieving these goals is the United Nations. The 75th anniversary of the creation of the United Nations will be celebrated on September 21st, 2020. The theme of the celebration is The Future We Want; The UN We Need.
In marking this anniversary, we are reminded that the creation of the UN did not come about by accident. It is difficult today to recapture the optimism and high spirits of those who, in the latter days of the most devasting war in all of human history, thought that a new world order was possible, or had already arrived. Of course, these visionaries were overly optimistic. All who roll boulders uphill are. A lesson for us looking back 75 years is that in the midst of a period of horror, the visionaries of the day were able to look at a world reduced to rubble and see in it a transformational moment for all. If they did that then, then surely we can find a transformation moment in what the world faces 75 years later.
Creating the UN was not a simple or straightforward proposition.
The UN inherited the same challenges faced by an earlier experiment in global cooperation, the League of Nations. For every voice favouring the creation of institutions committed to global cooperation there was another warning against the erosion of national sovereignty.
But even with greater ambitions the fledgling UN would not be able escape the fundamental paradox of all international bodies. The paradox is this: Since any such organization is created by its member states, it can only function effectively when it receives support from the national governments of which it is comprised.
As former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke famously offered “Blaming the UN for a crisis is like blaming Madison Square Gardens when the New York Knicks play badly. You are blaming a building.”
Complicating this matter is the fact that, by virtue of the conditions built into it’s founding charter, proposed action against rogue states cannot be pursued if a Great Power – that is one of the five countries possessing the veto in the Security Council – is opposed.
It is impossible to understand the history of the United Nations without understanding that this tension was baked into the system at the time of its birth. That said, even with this limitation built into its structure, the UN has made enormous progress in domains in which individual nations could not adequately or satisfactorily act alone.
Another reason that the collapse of the UN is not likely is the growing range of issues that the world faces that even the most powerful member states cannot address on their own.
We live on a different planet than we did in 1945. How could it be otherwise when, in the span of a single lifetime, the human population on Earth has swelled almost four-fold from two billion to nearly eight billion in 2020 and total global production grown from $4 trillion to more than $140 trillion in the same period. This has not come without unintended consequences.
At this time, however, it may be especially important to also acknowledge that not all the news about our current global situation is bad. A significant consolation is the growing power of international opinion to expose human rights abuses and cause even the most recalcitrant and repressive regimes to consider the consequences of their crimes. We cannot allow that pressure to let up.
If the Great Pause imposed on global society by COVID-19 is to be allowed to become a transformational moment, however, the level of change we need has to emerge from the hearts and collective conscience of humanity. At minimum that change has to manifest itself in action in the form of implementation of the UN’s existing framework for creating a more just and more sustainable world: the UN’s 2030 Transforming Our World global sustainable development agenda. Difficult as the UN’s sustainable development goals may appear to be to achieve, and distracted as we presently are by the pandemic, we cannot afford to lose sight of what this agenda can do for humanity.
This agenda may, if implemented now, may well be seen in time as the greatest gift the United Nations has given humanity.
In retrospect we see, that despite its failings, the UN has achieved a great deal since 1945. It is often claimed that “if the UN didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. But it does exist and it belongs to all the governments of the world and by extension to everyone on Earth. Humanity created it, and it will be humanity that inherits it.
The problems facing the UN as a world body 75 years into its 1945 mandate have not and will not deter it from trying “to save generations from the scourge of war,” “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,” and to promote “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” The original Preamble to the founding Charter of the United Nations had it right. The question now – in this second transformational moment 75 years later – is, can we finally do it? And the answer to that question is yes, we can.
The boulder is still only half way up the mountain. To create the future we want and the UN we need, much effort is still needed to move it further toward the top. From this we see that, just as in 1945, this is not the end of the world. It is just the beginning of another.
We see also that this truly is a transformational moment, for the UN certainly, but also for the entire world.