WHEN representatives of 51 states wrote the United Nations charter during three months of table-pounding in San Francisco in 1945, their prime concern was to correct the mistakes of the defunct League of Nations.
World War II, which the League had been organised to prevent, was still going on. Victory in Europe was achieved in the middle of the conference, and in Japan some two months later. The work was based on the hard-fought draft prepared by the US, the Soviet Union, Britain and China. It was already clear there would be angry disputes.
The UN started with 51 countries because the Soviet Union demanded 16 seats in the name of its 16 constituent republics. In a compromise, it ended up extracting three, adding Ukraine and the then Belorussia to the Soviet founding membership. Moscow also insisted on limiting participation to states which had declared war on Germany, which Latin America got around to doing just before the meeting. Even after the difficult start, the founding conference nearly broke down over the issue of 16 Poles with whom Stalin had promised to negotiate a new Polish government but whom he arrested when they turned up in Moscow.
Nevertheless, there was a tremendous euphoria, a real sense of inventing a new mechanism that would keep the world at peace. It was based on need, not reverie. The effort was to be realistic, hence permanent Security Council seats and the veto. Prevention of war, with if necessary forceful suppression of conflict by the major powers, was the new organisation's prime purpose.
From the start, everybody knew the UN couldn't work unless the major powers agreed. As Mexico's delegate, Ezequiel Padilla, put it: "The mice would be disciplined, but the lions would be free." But the big powers lapsed quickly into the Cold War. The Cold War polarised blocks, realigning former allies and enemies. The Third World started out not as the poor and the backward, but as those who refused to join either East or West. These lines veiled old and new disputes which, not surprisingly. erupted with the end of bi-polar force.
Meanwhile, the UN was fundamentally changed. It could not fulfill its first purpose of keeping the peace. But the notion of international community was still too powerfully appealing to be openly rejected (as the United States had rejected the League after World War I). So it was transformed with a multitude of agencies and funds and tasks to provide at least an illusion of global solidarity.
The veteran Finnish diplomat Max Jakobson, who would have become Secretary-General had Moscow not vetoed him because it wanted Kurt Waldheim, writes bluntly that the 197Os saw an attempt to make the UN administrator of "a global welfare state". The political consequences, Jakobson said, "were disastrous." The radical campaign, backed by the Soviets, to create a new international economic order "turned into an ideological assault on western values in general and the US in particular.
Naturally, Americans were disaffected. New York was chosen as headquarters over Geneva, which most founders preferred, in large part to make sure the US would stay in. On the one hand, the UN became the place where states could take their hopes and grievances 10 air before the whole world. In effect, the organisation became the Third World's capital, stressing the prime role of state governments. On the other hand, it was seen as a kind of global parliament of man, a somehow autonomous fount of universal law, morality, justice and compassion.
That guaranteed disillusion. As Paul Kennedy and Bruce Russett wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, it was not an embryonic world government but an international corporation, so to speak, with the nation-states as shareholders.
Beleaguered Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali never tires of pointing out that the UN can do no more than serve the will of its members. If they want to use it as a scapegoat to deflect notice from their own unwillingness or inability to act, as in Bosnia and Rwanda for example, then, he says, "that is a service, too.
But clearly this situation is not satisfactory. The widespread calls for reform in the UN's 50th anniversary year reflect not only its flaws and shortcomings but a sense of the pressing need for a world organisation that performs better, whether by limiting assignments and expectations, or by correcting bad habits and improving its structure.
One unnecessary burden has been imposed by the idea that internationalism and the UN are synonymous, that the UN does and ought to take everything under its leaky umbrella. It doesn't and it shouldn't. Other organisations function more effectively without any UN connection: regional ones like the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and the Organisation of American States. and others with specific, essentially technical duties such as the International Transport Agency, the International Telecommunication Union, the Bank for International Settlements and the World Trade Organisation.
When the Clinton administration took office and pronounced a new multilateral foreign policy, it didn't mean surrendering decisions to some UN majority. Mr Clinton was acknowledging that the US needs partners to make its foreign policy work, and therefore has to take its partners' needs into account.
It is unreasonable that the US continues to be assessed for 31 per cent of the UN's operating budget. That figure does not reflect the shift in the global economic balance of power since the end of World War II. Still, it is manifestly outrageous that the US owes nearly half of the organisation's $3.4 billion unpaid dues just because Congress angry.
THE UN's virtual bankruptcy had revived proposals to give the organisation resources of its own instead of being totally dependent on the whims of states. Several rational ideas have been advanced. These would in effect impose a tiny tax on the use of international commercial activities such as space-based communications, air travel, and financial transfers. The various technical problems could no doubt be resolved.
The real issue is that this would put a crimp into the UN principle that there is no higher sovereignty than that of states. While modern facts daily demonstrate the real limits on state sovereignty, governments are loathe to admit it.
Globalisation has happened in many fields: economics, communications, pollution and crime. Yet one activity has not been globalised politics. That is why the UN and many, though by no means all, of its agencies would have to be invented if they didn't exist. They provide an indispensable infrastructure to both the benefits of globalisation and the need to face its plagues.
Former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban contrasts the ever-receding dream of a UN-established "world peace under law" with the wisdom of traditional diplomats, who understand they "will usually have to compromise between what justice demands and what circumstances permit."
But that is exactly the job of the UN, to help advance more favourable circumstances. It needs to focus more on that, and less on bully-pulpit, self-inflating rhetoric.