History
editBackground and creation
editIn the century prior to the UN's creation, several international treaty organisations and conferences had been formed to regulate conflicts between nations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.[1] Following the catastrophic loss of life in World War I, the Paris Peace Conference established the League of Nations to maintain harmony between the nations.[2] This organisation successfully resolved some territorial disputes and created international structures for areas such as postal mail, aviation, and opium control, some of which would later be absorbed into the UN.[3] However, the League lacked representation for colonial peoples (then half the world's population) and significant participation from several major powers, including the US, USSR, Germany, and Japan; it failed to act against the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935, the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, and German expansions under Adolf Hitler that culminated in World War II.[4]
The earliest concrete plan for a new world organisation was begun under the aegis of the US State Department in 1939. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt first coined the term 'United Nations' as a term to describe the Allied countries.[a] The term was first officially used on 1 January 1942, when 26 governments signed the Atlantic Charter.[6]
In mid-1944, the Allied powers met for the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, D.C. to negotiate the UN's structure, and the composition of the UN Security Council quickly became the dominant issue. France, the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the UK, and US were selected as permanent members of the Security Council; the US attempted to add Brazil as a sixth member, but was opposed by the heads of the Russian and British delegations.[7] The most contentious issue at Dumbarton and in successive talks proved to be the veto rights of permanent members. The Soviet delegation argued that each nation should have an absolute veto that could block matters from even being discussed, while the British argued that nations should not be able to veto resolutions on disputes to which they were a party. At the Yalta Conference of February 1945, the American, British, and Russian delegations agreed that each of the "Big Five" could veto any action by the council, but not procedural resolutions, meaning that the permanent members could not prevent debate on a resolution.[8]
On 25 April 1945, the UN Conference on International Organization began in San Francisco, attended by 50 governments and a number of non-governmental organisations involved in drafting the United Nations Charter.[9] At the conference, H. V. Evatt of the Australian delegation pushed to further restrict the veto power of Security Council permanent members. Due to the fear that rejecting the strong veto would cause the conference's failure, his proposal was defeated twenty votes to ten.[10]
The UN officially came into existence on 24 October 1945 upon ratification of the Charter by the five then-permanent members of the Security Council and by a majority of the other 46 signatories.[9] On 17 January 1946, the Security Council met for the first time at Church House, Westminster, in London, England.[11]
Cold War
editThe Security Council was largely paralyzed in its early decades by the Cold War between the US and USSR and their allies, and the Council generally was only able to intervene in unrelated conflicts.[12] (A notable exception was the 1950 Security Council resolution authorising a US-led coalition to repel the North Korean invasion of South Korea, passed in the absence of the USSR.)[9][13] In 1956, the first UN peacekeeping force was established to end the Suez Crisis;[9] however, the UN was unable to intervene against the USSR's simultaneous invasion of Hungary following that country's revolution.[14]
In 1960, the UN deployed United Nations Operation in the Congo (UNOC), the largest military force of its early decades, to restore order to the breakaway State of Katanga, restoring it to the control of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by 1964.[15] While travelling to meet with rebel leader Moise Tshombe during the conflict, Dag Hammarskjöld, often named as one of the UN's most effective Secretaries-General,[16] died in a plane crash; months later he was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.[17] Hammarskjöld's successor U Thant deployed the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus in 1964, which would become one of the UN's longest-running peacekeeping missions.[18]
On 25 October 1971, over US opposition but with the support of many Third World nations, the mainland, communist People's Republic of China was given the Chinese seat on the Security Council in place of the Republic of China that occupied Taiwan; the vote was widely seen as a sign of waning US influence in the organisation.[19] With an increasing Third World presence and the failure of UN mediation in conflicts in the Middle East, Vietnam, and Kashmir, the UN increasingly shifted its attention to its ostensibly secondary goals of economic development and cultural exchange. By the 1970s, the UN budget for social and economic development was far greater than its budget for peacekeeping.[20]
Post-Cold War
editAfter the Cold War, the UN saw a radical expansion in its peacekeeping duties, taking on more missions in ten years' time than it had in its previous four decades.[21] The UN negotiated an end to the Salvadoran Civil War, launched a successful peacekeeping mission in Namibia, and oversaw democratic elections in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia.[22] In 1991, the UN authorised a US-led coalition that successfully repulsed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.[23] However, its mission in Somalia was widely viewed as a failure after the US withdrawal following casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu, and the UN mission to Bosnia faced "worldwide ridicule" for its indecisive and confused mission in the face of ethnic cleansing.[24] In 1994, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda failed to intervene in the Rwandan Genocide in the face of Security Council indecision.[25]
In the late 1990s and 2000s, UN-authorised international interventions took a wider variety of forms. The UN mission in the 1991–2002 Sierra Leone Civil War was supplemented by British Royal Marines, and the UN-authorised 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was overseen by NATO.[26] In 2003, the US invaded Iraq despite failing to pass a UN Security Council resolution for authorization, prompting a new round of questioning of the organisation's effectiveness.[27] Under the current Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, the UN has intervened with peacekeepers in crises including the War in Darfur in Sudan and the Kivu conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2013, an internal review of UN actions in the final battles of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009 concluded that the organisation had suffered "systemic failure".[28]
References
edit- ^ Kennedy, p. 5
- ^ Kennedy, p. 8
- ^ Kennedy, p. 10
- ^ Kennedy, pp. 13–24
- ^ Manchester and Reid, p. 461
- ^ Mires, p. 15
- ^ Meisler, p. 9
- ^ Meisler, pp. 10–13
- ^ a b c d "Milestones in United Nations History". Department of Public Information, United Nations. Retrieved 22 November 2013.
- ^ Meisler, pp. 18–19
- ^ "What is the Security Council?". United Nations. Retrieved 24 November 2013.
- ^ Meisler, p. 35
- ^ Meisler, pp. 58–59
- ^ Meisler, p. 114
- ^ Meisler, pp. 115–134
- ^ See Meisler, p. 76; Kennedy, p. 60; Fasulo pp. 17, 20
- ^ Meisler, pp. 127–28, 134
- ^ Meisler, pp. 156–57
- ^ Meisler, pp. 195–97
- ^ Meisler, pp. 167–68, 224–25
- ^ Meisler, p. 286
- ^ Meisler, pp. 252–56
- ^ Meisler, pp. 264–77
- ^ For quotation "worldwide ridicule", see Meisler, p. 293; for description of UN missions in Somalia and Bosnia, see Meisler, pp. 312–29.
- ^ Kennedy, p. 104
- ^ Kennedy, pp. 110–11
- ^ Kennedy, p. 111
- ^ "UN failed during final days of Lankan ethnic war: Ban Ki-moon". FirstPost. Press Trust of India. 25 September 2013. Retrieved 5 November 2013.
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