The United Nations

Monday 24 October this year is Veterans Day in the United States, the day when we honour the dead of all the American wars and it's also, by a rueful coincidence, United Nations Day, the annual celebration of the coming into effect of the charter of the United Nations which was signed at San Francisco, where the World Organisation was set up in June 1945.

If the irony of this coincidence escapes anyone, let me read to you the opening of the preamble to the charter which took many days to write. Its author was the late Field Marshal Smuts of South Africa who, once he'd finished it, told another distinguished delegate to the conference and in private, 'I'll get into awful hot water when I get home from some of the old battleaxes'. And he did. 

It says, 'We, the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations, large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom and for these ends', etc. etc. 'have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims, we do, hereby, establish an international organisation to be known as the United Nations.' 

The text of the whole charter follows. It was signed on 26 June in San Francisco and was to come into effect when two-thirds of the member nations had ratified it and that happened on 24 October. And the United Nations was a fact as the second international attempt in this century to form a world organisation which hoped, as President Eisenhower put it in 1953, to 'substitute the conference table for the battlefield'. 

Well, there is no sensible call at this late date to riddle this anniversary with sarcasm or bemoan the huge contrast between the high-minded hopes of that preamble and the wholesale mockery of it by nations all around the world in the past 32 years. 

At San Francisco in 1945, the New York Times had at least 20 correspondents covering the founding conference and many more minions on hand. And for many years there was never a day without two or three or more stories datelined United Nations, NY; more, sometimes, when the General Assembly, the big plenary body, was in session as it always is every autumn. 

Well, today, this morning, I'm looking at the New York Times. No paper anywhere has been more responsible in covering the UN. Today's Times has 88 pages. I have looked them over carefully and the page one index carries a promise. It says, 'UN Events, section A page 9.' You turn there and you find at the bottom of the page six lines. It says, 'The UN today, General Assembly, meets at 1030 a.m. and 3 p.m., listed to speak in the general debate Cape Verde, Lesotho, Swaziland, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Mali, Cameroon, Somalia, Algeria.' Not one of these places was a sovereign nation in 1945. And that's the coverage. 

When the United Nations had 50 member states, there never seemed to be enough room even when it got its permanent buildings on New York's East River for the international press. Today the big papers have their names up on shingles outside certain rooms but it's as plain as can be, wherever you are, that the world's press has, on the whole, given up covering the United Nations which now contains 149 members. And total strangers to the UN, some of them otherwise very knowledgeable people, tend to say, 'Why? Why 149 nations?' 

Well, it's the result of the break-up of the old colonial empires – a massive movement we barely anticipated at San Francisco. We knew then there was going to be trouble in Indonesia and South Africa but if some clairvoyant had foreseen the big break-up, I think he would have expected the new nations to be the old colonial territories with a new name. Not with many new names. In other words, we didn't anticipate that once in Africa, say, the British, German, Belgian and French possessions were liquidated or liberated that they would then begin to break up within themselves with each province or tribe or whatever asserting its right to be a sovereign nation. 

When this movement became a landslide, when the 50 nations had grown to something like 80 or so, I remember discussing this with the then Secretary-General, the gentle Burmese called U Thant. He thought that the break-up and the passion for independence among tribes, sects, mountain valleys, islands was, however deplorable as a practical matter, a natural reaction against having been a lackey or, not to be emotional about it, a dependant part of some nation's colonial empire. 

But what struck us then was that many of these so-called nations, in Africa especially, were so many parcels of land that did not possess the raw materials, and never a balance of farming and industry that would help them to have a self-sustaining economy. The old empires were large enough in their units and helped the imperial power prosper exceedingly because under the same flag was cotton in one region, tin in another, sulphates here, diamonds there. When U Thant was looking over all this, he saw a new generation of friction, which is certainly in full fury now, between small, new nations which would have to form themselves into new blocs to have a going economy, but the blocs are not the same as the old colonial blocs. U Thant thought that once the passion for independence was satisfied and seen not to be as satisfying as people had hoped in the day of independence, there would be a new alignment of big regional alliances and, one day, four or five or whatever big alliances joining or fighting for their common interests. 

Well, the United Nations today, again, has huge, opposing voting blocs but whereas in the 1940s and Fifties the whole show was the United States, Britain and Western Europe with their satellite votes in Latin America versus the Soviet Union and its eastern satellites, that has gone. The big blocs are in Africa and Asia and no longer can what we call the Western world assert anything like the power it used to have. This is one deep reason, I think, why Westerners tend to be cynical and contemptuous of the UN. When they ran the show, it seemed to work. Now they don't, they think it's gone to pot. 

An extreme view, but it lies at the root of the disillusion of many quite sophisticated men. And then people say, 'What wars did the United Nations ever stop?', which is a reckless question because the United Nations has stopped wars in Iran and Kashmir and Indonesia and the Congo and the Middle East and many other places we've forgotten. But a stopped war makes no headlines. 

We only know that the United Nations has not been the superpower it hoped to be, that real power and the balance of it or the assertion of it, rest with the two big superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, with China in the offing and that, except in the extreme case of a nuclear threat, as with the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, they do not go to the United Nations for help or permission to act. And neither do the little nations that fight with guns and tanks or knives, for if they ever had any fear that they'd be punished by the United Nations, they've lost it. They know that the United Nations can get out resolutions condemning this action or that but the resolutions fall like water off a duck's back and no action is taken. 

This defiance of the charter, which practically every nation you can name has practised in its own interests, was made possible by one central failure. It's one that old United Nations' hands hate to have brought up but it is, to me, the root cause why today nations can fight if they choose and receive no reprisal or punishment from the UN. In the charter, there is an article, Number 43, which bound the members to make available to the Security Council, whenever it asked for them, arms and armed forces facilities to put down conflicts and secure peace. In other words, the United Nations was to become a super-arsenal able to call on such massive arms and men fighting as a United Nations force that would be overwhelmingly larger than the forces of any member nation or any combination that might get out of hand. 

To put it baldly, the idea is there – and it's plainly stated – that the UN would have on call an army, a navy, an air force superior to anything the United States, for instance, or the Soviet Union could muster. These agreements to provide arms, men, facilities and so on, were, quote, 'to be negotiated as soon as possible' unquote. That was written and sworn to in 1945. After 32 years, no such agreements have ever been negotiated. 

This is not a weakness in the charter, it's the human fatal weakness of its nation states, if you like, of you and me. Maybe the third time round, if there is one, we'll have to agree reluctantly) to pool our forces in order to survive. 

Meanwhile we might remember on Monday 24, the enormously unrecorded work of the non-political agencies, what they've done for the world's health and agriculture and the starving children, not to mention cultural exchange and civil aviation and much other worldwide work done by United Nations teams recruited from modestly paid and selfless men and women. 

And this vast humanitarian work apart, even on the scratching, screaming, rhetorical level of politics and power, there's no question in the mind of anyone who has watched the brave and often pathetic history of the United Nations in the past 32 years, that the world, however badly off it seems to be now, would have been in much worse shape without it.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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