The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations“With all its defects, with all the failures that we can check up against it, the UN still represents man’s best-organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield.” –Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 The signing of the United Nations Charter in 1945 was an unprecedented development in the history of humankind. For the first time, the world’s most powerful sovereign nation states came together to create an autonomous organization designed to, in the Charter’s words, “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war [and] reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” Sixty years later, the UN still doggedly pursues that mandate, albeit not without difficulty and certainly not without criticism. In The Parliament of Man, the distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy gives a thorough and timely history of the United Nations that explains the institution’s roots and functions while also casting an objective eye on the UN’s effectiveness as a body and on its prospects for success in meeting the challenges that lie ahead. Building on expertise he gained in drafting official reports for the UN’s fiftieth anniversary on how to improve the organization’s performance, Kennedy makes sense of the many commissions and committees, and how its six main operating bodies–General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council (UNESCO), Trusteeship Council, Secretariat, and International Court–operate and interact. Citing examples from the UN’s history, he shows how the five permanent members of the Security Council–the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France–on numerous occasions overcame political antagonisms to spearhead military supervision of aid in humanitarian crises, and how lack of cooperation among the great powers has hamstrung such initiatives as the control of greenhouse gas emissions and exacerbated the deleterious effects of globalization on developing nations’ economies. As a body, the UN emerges here for what it is: fallible, human-based, oftentimes dependent on the whims of powerful national governments or the foibles of individual senior UN administrators, but utterly indispensable. In The Parliament of Man, Kennedy ably proves that “it is difficult to imagine how much more riven and ruinous our world of six billion people would be if there had been no UN social, environmental, and cultural agendas–and no institutions to attempt to put them into practice on the ground.” |
Contents
The Troubled Advance to a New World Order 18151945 | 3 |
The Conundrum of the Security Council | 51 |
Peacekeeping and Warmaking | 77 |
Copyright | |
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The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations Paul Kennedy No preview available - 2007 |
The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations Paul Kennedy No preview available - 2007 |
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action advance Africa agenda agree agreement American Amnesty International Article Assembly authority Boutros Boutros-Ghali Brian Urquhart Britain British Central Chapter China civil Cold War collapse Commission conference conflict countries created crisis critics cultural curity Council decades decisions developing world dispute earlier early East Economic and Social ECOSOC elected environmental especially established Europe example forces France future global governments groups idea India international peace issue Japan League liberal major matters membership ment Military Staff Committee million missions negotiations NGOs parliament peace and security peace enforcement peacekeeping peacekeeping and peace peacekeeping operations perhaps Permanent Five policies political powers present Charter reform regard regime regional resolutions role Rwanda Secretariat secretary-general secretary-general's Security Council simply Social Council Somalia South Soviet specialized agencies structures territories tion tional troops Trusteeship Council UN Charter UN's UNESCO UNICEF United Nations USSR veto vote women World Bank world body world organization