What would you say has been the UNs greatest sucess in the past 20 years?
I can’t think of the specific event, but the UN did good work overseeing the seperation of one micro-country from another in the last decade. What was the name of that place?
Helping East Timor achieve independence.
By the way, there actually is a sucess.com. It’s just a links page to other websites that spell success with two "c"s.
The near eradication of polio, from 350,000 cases worldwide 15 years ago, to 1,185 cases last year. (It would have been more impressive if I was writing last year, because in 2003, there were only 784 polio cases, but there was a spike last year after parts of Nigeria refused to get innoculated.
How about wiping out small pox?
Everytime anyone mentions the UN they seem to only focus on the security council and the General assembly and ignore UN oganizations like the World Health Organization.
Maybe they are not totally usless and can serve a purpose for teh population as a whole that individual governements can not or will not do for themselves.
Now I’m off by a few years seeing at it was erradicated in 1979. However the W.H.O. is still working on other preventable diseases such as its attempts to eliminate Polio world wide.
In no particular order of importance:[ul][li]Via the periodically updated Conference on Disarmament, establishing a globally agreed mechanism to prevent nuclear weapons being used in anger. Given humankind’s history, that such powerful weapons have somehow not been used is nigh unbelievable.[/li][li]Peacekeeping in, amongst many others, [list][/li][li]Israel/Egypt []Cyprus []Mozambique []Georgia and []Sierra Leone[/ul][/li]all of which prevented (and still prevent) wars which would definitely have broken out again otherwise. (The 10 main troop-contributing countries to UN peacekeeping operations as of June 2004 were Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Ghana, India, Ethiopia, South Africa, Uruguay, Jordan and Kenya. The US is 26th with 430 peacekeepers compared to Pakistan’s 8500).
[li]Administration of war torn regions to establish stability after major conflict. Notably Bosnia and Kosovo (and note that NATO is not necessarily outside the UN any more than the East Coast states are outside the US - whether preventing all-out civil war in Kosovo was “the UN” is not cut-and-dried, and I’d argue it was).[/li][li]Preventing suffering via bodies such as the World Food Programme.[/list][/li]
The UN is its member states. If its member states ignore it (especially its most important member who signed, and practically wrote, its Charter), then the “irrelevance of the UN” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
By thus rationale, then isn’t any achievement of UN Member States attributable to the UN? BY extension, shouldn’t you attribute the shitty things member states do to the UN as well?
Yes, you’re absolutely right. The failings of the UN are the failings of its members, and vice versa.
At the moment the UN, despite successes in near impossible circumstances, is like the US would be if only the five biggest states had any real clout in the assembly and many of the states (including one of those five) turn up without any democratic mandate. If the UN is to be less ineffectual and undemocratic so that it fails less often, its members must agree to bide by its decisions. That was how the American states banded together in the 18th century, and it is how the states of Earth must do so in the 22nd.
Okay. Then one of the biggest achievements of the UN has been it’s removal of Saddam Hussein.
Unfortunately, I am not as thrilled with the UN’s so-far-lackluster job in rebuilding Iraq.
Does this conversation strike you as nonsensical?
Only as nonsensical as the phrase “US civil war”, really: if the states were united, they wouldn’t be at war, and if they weren’t then the US couldn’t have had one.
The UN is not solely those people in those buildings in New York and their employees, any more than the US is those people in those buildings in Washington and their employees. If war broke out between California and Utah, it would be a failing of the US as a whole just as the situation in Iraq ultimately came about because the UN was not powerful enough to stop its own members ignoring it.
As SentientMeat said, a success in some way, can also be part of a larger failure.
So yes, the actions of Britain and the US in Iraq could be seen as a successful action undertaken by UN members whilst at the same time being part of a wider failure of the UN to be able to agree and follow a unified course of action.
Paddy Ashdown’s finest moment!
I should have kept an article I read once, more exactly an interview of the UN oficia in charge of keeping the treaties (the original documents). Basically, he was saying that without the UN essentially nothing people take as a given, internationally, would work, be it business, mail, transport, etc… because most treaties regulating these things have been negociated and signed at the UN.
As a couple posters mentionned, it’s worth remembering that the UN isn’t involved only in international security, but in pretty much anything, like education, food, health…