The Real U.N. Day

Last Friday was “U.N. Day,” a time to celebrate the contributions of the United Nations. Ironically, discussion at Harvard has celebrated that shining example of the power of pluralism with predictable negativity. These recent critiques are the same obvious, tired critiques that have been voiced again and again for as long as the U.N. has been in existence. They are the same critiques that are voiced in The Crimson and the Salient. But they are all critiques that fail to explain how the United Nations’ Development Program improved the lives of farmers in West Africa, or how U.N. peacekeepers quelled violence in East Timor, or how the U.N. won the Centennial Nobel Peace Prize in 2001.

Recent writers have decried the U.N. as an impotent body, unable to stop the evils in the world. Yet anyone familiar with the rich history of U.N. operations over the last half-century knows that this statement is false, if not ludicrous. The truth is that the U.N. has done more to safeguard the lives and fundamental rights of the world’s population than any other institution in history and that it continues to stand as one of the few sources of hope available to hundreds of millions of uneducated, ill and impoverished people around the world. It is true that the U.N. has failed on many occasions to rise to its own high ideals, and that some of challenges facing the free world have proved—for now—to be beyond the U.N.’s ability to solve. But this is not an indictment of the U.N. so much as a reason to continue the organization’s expansion and reform.

The U.N. has proven to be successful in military as well as economic and humanitarian spheres. In the past ten years or so, the world has been given multiple examples of effective U.N. intervention. In the Gulf War of 1991, Kuwaiti liberation succeeded because of a massive U.N.-led multilateral effort, and few can argue with the result. A U.N.-backed, NATO-led effort to save Kosovo from the territorial machinations of Slobodan Milosevic and Yugoslavia was equally successful. It is U.N. bodies like the International Criminal Tribunal that are striving to bring justice to Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

The U.N. has further fought for the empowerment of repressed and minority groups, as well as for development initiatives which have fed, clothed, housed, powered and educated tens of thousands. Consider the unanimously adopted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a series of measurable targets in areas ranging from poverty reduction to women’s rights. Each MDG signatory works to meet those targets by 2015. And, as we dress up for Halloween, we remember how we dropped pennies into UNICEF boxes every October in order inoculate children in Africa, raising $188 million.

Perhaps it can be said that the U.N. has had its shortfalls as well. But those failures can point the world in the direction of positive U.N. reform. Almost universally, those who list U.N. “failures,” such as non-intervention in Rwanda, criticize the U.N. for its inability to act. This criticism misses the point. Just as U.N. successes are in large part the result of international enthusiasm for U.N. projects, so too are U.N. failures often the result of a lack of firm support and commitment from member nations.

This is the critical point in the U.N. debate: the U.N. works with the resources and the authority it is given, and it is currently not given enough of either commodity to do everything its stingy member nations demand of it. In 2001, about 5,000 Bangladeshis participated in peace-keeping operations along with only 1,000 US soldiers and 100 Chinese. Instead of burning the U.N. flag, perhaps last week’s Salient should have considered a mass burning of the flags of the US, Britain, Russia, China and 187 other states.

Or perhaps the path to a better world lies not through pyrotechnics but through a reformed U.N. in which all nations place their confidence and support. This investment in the U.N. is so vital because recent events have shown that states cannot go it alone for very long. The United States is now actively seeking international help in Iraq, acknowledging that building alone a new state is impossible. Unilateral interventions in countries such as Somalia failed. But when interventions do take place, who establishes order, enforces rule of law, and picks up the pieces? Only the U.N. can legitimately fulfill these tasks. Frankly, that is not a bad situation: the U.N. has proven it can work and we all know how to make it work better.

Compromise is stronger than conflict, multilateralism is stronger than unilateralism and the legacy of the U.N.’s accomplishments is stronger than polemical editorials. Perhaps Oct. 24, 2004, will be marked less by inflammatory rhetoric than by reasoned discussion of an organization that has proven time and again that it can bring about change where no other person or nation can.

David K. Kessler ’04, an economics concentrator in Winthrop House, is president of the International Relations Council (IRC). Swati Mylavarapu ’05, a special concentrator in Human Rights and International Development in Mather House, is IRC vice-president for external affairs. Richard M. Re ’04, a social studies concentrator in Quincy House, is editor-in-chief of the Harvard International Review.