when other regions of the world are experimenting with international organization
at the regional level. In assessing contemporary events, it is all too easy to get caught
up in the immediate. This section locates these principle institutions in a longer-
term context at the same time that it takes account of the very real challenges facing
IOs in the contemporary era.
- 1 The United Nations
A detailed history of the UN is not possible here. Rather, we need to tease out the
salience of its evolution, contemporary standing, and prospects for a more gener-
alized understanding of the role of international organizations in global politics.
Perhaps the key element in its origins is the degree to which it claimed not to repeat
the structure of the failed League of Nations, but to which, with hindsight, it has a
greater resemblance and salience for the future of the organization than the
founders might care to admit.
Although established in a much more professional manner than the League, the
UN as a collective security system, with its Secretariat, General Assembly, and
Security Council and underwritten by the principle of the sovereign equality
of states, resembled the earlier failed institution (see Armstrong, Lloyd, and
Redmand 2004 :37V). The key diVerence was, of course, the veto of the permanent
members (P 5 ) in the Security Council. But there was more to the UN system than
that. There was also the creation of UN agencies dealing with issues ranging from
atomic energy (IAEA), children (UNICEF), civil aviation (ICAO), development
(UNDP and UNCTAD), education, science, culture, research and training
(UNESCO, UNITAR, and UNU), food and agriculture (FAO), human rights,
narcotics, and drugs (ECOSOC), through to intellectual property (WIPO), and
this list is by no means exhaustive.
While these agencies have never worked other than sub-optimally, the end of the
cold war saw a renewed optimism that the UN might at long last fulWl those roles
which many had originally conceived for it—as the only ‘‘universal, general pur-
pose’’ IO (Diehl 2001 , 6 ) charged with generating global public goods to mitigate
conXict and guarantee peace, security, and well-being. In order to understand why
this has not happened to date it is important to note that the world in 2005 is not the
world into which the UN was born sixty years previously and that reform poses
major diYculties given changes in world order. The key inhibitor of the UN’s core
business is, as UN Secretary General KoWAnnan ( 2000 , 6 ) has frequently noted,
‘‘globalization’’ or more precisely the inability of the UN to mitigate the negative
elements of globalization such as global poverty or enhance global security in the
face of the major change in war-Wghting—the shift from interstate war to non-state
(terrorist) war-Wghting.
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