Реферат: United Nations Essay Research Paper INTRODUCTIONTHE ISSUESThe

Subsequent U.N. efforts, notably the peacekeeping missions to Somalia and Bosnia, have reaffirmed longstanding doubts about the organization’s ability to play a critical role in world affairs. “I would argue that the U.N. foes serve a useful purpose, but in a limited context,” says Carpenter of the Cato Institute. “It’s worthwhile as a forum for airing grievances and disputes, and it’s useful for the traditional peacekeeping operations, that is to say to police existing cease-fires. It can serve a useful purpose as well as a kind of mediation service to head off conflicts. But it’s not well-equipped or well-designed to engage in nation building projects, as in Somalia, or—even worse—to try to manage civil wars, which it is trying to do in Bosnia. Overreaching in that way discredits the organization.”

Peacekeeping is not the only role for which some experts say the U.N. is less suited than many once predicted. The organization includes fifteen agencies working to improve health care, nutrition, human rights, and other social and economic goals. With the Cold War’s end, it was hoped that the U.N. would be free to concentrate more of its member states’ resources on improving living conditions in the poorest areas of the world. But critics say that the U.N. agencies are too politicized, poorly managed, and wasteful to carry out their mandates. “Whenever possible, I think the U.N. ought to utilize nongovernmental organizations more than it has in the past,” Carpenter says.

U.N. supporters say that such diminished expectations for the world body are misplaced. “Clearly, the roles of the U.N. should be changed from time to time, depending on what the international community needs done that require multilateral solutions,” says Luck of the United Nations Association. “But in general terms, the U.N. should be more needed at a time when there is a multipolar world without a bilateral competition that tends to freeze so much in the security area. There are many, many functional, technical problems in the economic, environmental, humanitarian, and social realms that require very broad international cooperation. The U.N. in that sense should have a major role to play.”

Urquhart agrees. “I don’t think it really makes any sense not to make the U.N. work,” he says. “You have to make it work because there isn’t anything else.”

Should the United States reduce its support of the United Nations?

All members contribute funds to the United Nations, and some of these contributions are mandatory. The amount of each country’s mandatory assessment is based on a formula that reflects national and per capita income.

At the U.N.’s founding in 1945, the United States was by far the richest and most powerful member state. Reflecting this economic reality, the U.S. contributed nearly half – 49.89 percent – of the U.N.’s $24 million 1945-46 budget. That rate was lowered over the years, as other industrial countries benefited from the postwar economic boom and new members were added to the U.N.’s roster.

But the United States remains by far the largest financial contributor to the United Nations, providing twenty-five percent of its $1.3 billion budget for 1995. The four other permanent members of the Security Council contribute far less: France, 6.32 percent; Russia, 5.68 percent; the United Kingdom, 5.27 percent; and China, .72 percent. (4)

The costs of U.N. peacekeeping operations – which are largely unpredictable are often quite high – are assessed separately from the regular budget. As the number of peacekeeping missions grew in the early 1990s, the budget for the operations approached $1 billion, and the United States was expected to pay 32 percent of the costs. With President Clinton’s support, Congress in 1994 unilaterally cut the U.S. share of the peacekeeping budget to 25 percent, the same rate the United States pays for the regular U.N. budget.

Republican lawmakers, who captured the majority in both houses of Congress in 1994’s elections, say American taxpayers still are not getting a fair return on their investment in U.N. operations, and they are leading the call to reduce the United States’ commitment to the organization.

Downplaying the U.N.’s record over the past half-century, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said, “We have to recognize that we won the Cold War and what kept the peace was Americans’ willingness to lead. If my choice is three U.N. secretaries-general or one aircraft carrier, I can tell you which one I prefer to keep the peace in a dangerous world.” (5)

Bob Dole, R-Kan., offered a similar view. “A strong military is far more important to the nation’s ability to protect its interests and retain its global leadership role than additional foreign aid grants and subsidies for questionable multilateral activities,” he wrote in a recent op-ed column. (6)

Bills now before Congress would further reduce U.S. funding of U.N. operations and condition future payments on the enactment of reforms to improve the U.N.’s accountability and management. (7)

“I think these proposed cuts are fully warranted,” Carpenter says. “In fact, one could make the argument for even deeper cuts. The organization needs to slim down, and it needs to eliminate the pandemic corruption that has occurred in the bureaucracy. It also needs to focus on a small number of reasonable functions and not have delusions of being a de facto world government. It was never meant to be that, it’s not going to become that and even the more vague notions in that direction ought to be discouraged.”

The bottom line for many Republicans is that Americans should work through the United Nations only when it directly serves U.S. interests. “If it suits our interests to make the United Nations effective, then we should do so, and if it doesn’t, then we shouldn’t,” Bolton says. “What we need is a decision [by the administration] in each case whether using [the U.N.] is better for American interests than not using it.”

Supporters of the United Nations say it provides a priceless service by spreading the responsibility for global peacekeeping – a role that in the U.N.’s absence would even fall more heavily on the United States. “Despite the many inefficiencies in the U.N. system, the burden sharing with so many other countries still makes it quite an economic bargain for us,” says Luck. He points out the Americans currently are spending just a little over four dollars per person for the U.N. peacekeeping operations.

“That’s less than one two-hundredth of what we spend on defense,” Luck continues. “Considering that the total costs of one B-2 bomber is $2.2 billion, our total U.N. peacekeeping costs are half of one B-2 bomber. I don’t think that is such an outrageous amount to spend.”

There also is disagreement over how much support the U.S. should give to U.N. agencies specializing in economic and social issues. “There clearly are some that are better than other,” Bolton says. He cites the Universal Postal Union, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the International Maritime Organization, and the International Civil Aviation Organization as examples of U.N. agencies that merit U.S. support. “The ones that are truly specialized and that stick to their knitting can be very useful,” he says. “The problem is that there is a whole alphabet soup of agencies that overlap and duplicate their responsibilities.”

Some experts see the U.N.’s accomplishments in economic and social development as the most convincing case for strong U.S. support of the organization. “U.N. peacekeeping operations have been the center of controversy,” James Gustave Speth, administrator of the U.N. Development Program, said. “But few have mentioned the other U.N. – the U.N. of the developing world. The U.N.’s development work is as important as its peacekeeping work, and is right now under even greater threat in the U.S. Congress. Most importantly, those two U.N. roles are linked – because the U.N. can only be a strong force for peace if it is a strong force for development. (8)

CHAPTER 1

BACKGROUND

ORIGINS IN WAR

The establishment of the United Nations was not the world’s first attempt to coordinate political and military activity in the search for peace. Its predecessor, the League of Nations, was created in 1919 at the close of World War I. But the league had barely opened its doors in Geneva, Switzerland, before its inability to prevent military aggression became apparent.

Japan withdrew from the league in 1931 after invading Manchuria; Adolph Hitler pulled Germany out in 1933. Although it continued to exist until it was replaced by the United Nations in 1945, the league ceased to exert any influence after Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and the subsequent outbreak of World War II.

The idea of a successor to the league was discussed long before the war ended. Representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China, allies in the fighting in Europe and the Pacific, met several times in 1943 and 1944 to draw up proposals for the new international body’s purposes and organization.

The U.N.’s founders had clear ideas about what the new organization was to accomplish. In the preamble of the U.N. Charter adopted in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, they set out four primary goals: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetimes has brought untold sorrow to mankind…; to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights…; 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.”

To promote those goals, the founders established distinct bodies within the U.N. system – which came into being when the charter was ratified by the fifty-one original members on October 24, 1945. The Security Council, made up of the five permanent and ten rotating member countries, was given primary responsibility for international peace and security. All member states were to have an equal voice in the General Assembly, which decides budgetary matters and votes on other policy issues in non-binding resolutions. Fifteen specialized agencies carry out operations in the social and economic spheres.

Created at the dawn of the Cold War, the United Nations placed nuclear arms control and disarmament near the top of its agenda. It promoted a number of arms agreements, including the Limited Test Ban Treaty and bans on testing under the seas and in outer space. In 1957, the U.N. created the International Atomic Energy Agency to promote the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. In 1968, the General Assembly drafted the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it extended indefinitely in May of 1995. (9)

The United Nations also has had an active role in promoting human rights around the world. “Stalin could kill eight million peasants in the Ukraine in the 1930s and nobody raised a whisper,” Urquhart recalls. “Nobody had ever heard of human rights on the international stage, and now they have, thanks in large part to the U.N.”