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Intergovernmental self-regulatory body From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The United Nations (UN) is a diplomatic and political[2] international organization with the intended purpose of maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations, achieving international cooperation, and serving as a center for coordinating the actions of member nations.[3] It is widely recognised as the world's largest international organization.[4] The UN is headquartered in New York City, in international territory with certain privileges extraterritorial to the United States, and the UN has other offices in Geneva, Nairobi, Vienna, and The Hague, where the International Court of Justice is headquartered at the Peace Palace.
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| Headquarters | 760 United Nations Plaza, Manhattan, New York City (international zone) | ||||||
| Largest city | Tokyo, Japan | ||||||
| Official languages | |||||||
| Type | Intergovernmental organization | ||||||
| Membership | 193 member states 2 observer states | ||||||
| Leaders | |||||||
| António Guterres | |||||||
| Amina J. Mohammed | |||||||
| Philemon Yang | |||||||
| Bob Rae | |||||||
| Establishment | |||||||
• UN Charter signed | 26 June 1945 | ||||||
• Charter entered into force | 24 October 1945 | ||||||
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The UN was established after World War II with the aim of preventing future world wars, and succeeded the League of Nations, which was characterized as being ineffective.[5] On 25 April 1945, 50 nations assembled in San Francisco, California for a conference and initialised the drafting of the UN Charter, which was adopted on 25 June 1945. The charter took effect on 24 October 1945, when the UN began operations. The UN's objectives, as outlined by its charter, include maintaining international peace and security, protecting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, promoting sustainable development, and upholding international law.[6] At its founding, the UN had 51 member states; as of 2024[update], it has 193 sovereign states, nearly all of the world's recognized sovereign states.[7]
The UN's mission to preserve world peace was complicated in its initial decades due in part to Cold War tensions that existed between the United States and Soviet Union and their respective allies. Its mission has included the provision of primarily unarmed military observers and lightly armed troops charged with primarily monitoring, reporting and confidence-building roles.[8] UN membership grew significantly following the widespread decolonization in the 1960s. Since then, 80 former colonies have gained independence, including 11 trust territories that had been monitored by the Trusteeship Council.[9] By the 1970s, the UN's budget for economic and social development programmes vastly exceeded its spending on peacekeeping. After the end of the Cold War in 1991, the UN shifted and expanded its field operations, undertaking a wide variety of complex tasks.[8]
The UN comprises six principal operational organizations: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice, the UN Secretariat, and the Trusteeship Council, although the Trusteeship Council has been suspended since 1994. The UN System includes a multitude of specialized agencies, funds, and programmes, including the World Bank Group, the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNESCO, and UNICEF. Additionally, non-governmental organizations may be granted consultative status with the Economic and Social Council and other agencies.
The UN's chief administrative officer is the secretary-general, currently António Guterres who is a Portuguese politician and diplomat. He began his first five-year term on 1 January 2017 and was re-elected on 8 June 2021. The organization is financed by assessed and voluntary contributions from its member states.
The UN, its officers, and its agencies have won multiple Nobel Peace Prizes, although other evaluations of its effectiveness have been contentious. Some commentators believe the organization to be a leader in peace and human development, while others have criticized it for ineffectiveness, bias, and corruption.
In the century prior to the UN's creation, several international organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross were formed to ensure protection and assistance for victims of armed conflict and strife.[10]
During World War I, several major leaders, especially U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, advocated for a world body to guarantee peace. The winners of the war, the Allies, met to decide on formal peace terms at the Paris Peace Conference. The League of Nations was approved and started operations, but the United States never joined. On 10 January 1920, the League of Nations formally came into being when the Covenant of the League of Nations, ratified by 42 nations in 1919, took effect.[11] The League Council acted as an executive body directing the Assembly's business. It began with four permanent members—the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Japan.
After some limited successes and failures during the 1920s, the League proved ineffective in the 1930s, as it failed to act against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1933. Forty nations voted for Japan to withdraw from Manchuria but Japan voted against it and walked out of the League instead of withdrawing from Manchuria.[12] It also failed to act against the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, after the appeal for international intervention by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I at Geneva in 1936 went with no avail, including when calls for economic sanctions against Italy failed. Italy and other nations left the League.[13]
When war broke out in 1939, the League effectively closed down.[14]
The first step towards the establishment of the United Nations was the Inter-Allied Conference in London that led to the Declaration of St James's Palace on 12 June 1941.[15][16] By August 1941, American President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had drafted the Atlantic Charter; which defined goals for the post-war world. At the subsequent meeting of the Inter-Allied Council in London on 24 September 1941, the eight governments in exile of countries under Axis occupation, together with the Soviet Union and representatives of the Free French Forces, unanimously adopted adherence to the common principles of policy set forth by Britain and the United States.[17][18]
Roosevelt and Churchill met at the White House in December 1941 for the Arcadia Conference. Roosevelt considered a founder of the UN,[19][20] coined the term United Nations to describe the Allied countries. [21] Churchill accepted it, noting its use by Lord Byron.[22] The text of the Declaration by United Nations was drafted on 29 December 1941, by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Harry Hopkins. It incorporated Soviet suggestions but included no role for France. One major change from the Atlantic Charter was the addition of a provision for religious freedom, which Stalin approved after Roosevelt insisted.[23][24]
Roosevelt's idea of the "Four Powers", refers to the four major Allied countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China, emerged in the Declaration by the United Nations.[25] On New Year's Day 1942, Roosevelt, Churchill, the Soviet Union's former Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, and the Chinese Premier T. V. Soong signed the "Declaration by United Nations",[26] and the next day the representatives of twenty-two other nations added their signatures. During the war, the United Nations became the official term for the Allies. In order to join, countries had to sign the Declaration and declare war on the Axis powers.[27]
The October 1943 Moscow Conference resulted in the Moscow Declarations, including the Four Power Declaration on General Security which aimed for the creation "at the earliest possible date of a general international organization". This was the first public announcement that a new international organization was being contemplated to replace the League of Nations. The Tehran Conference followed shortly afterwards at which Roosevelt, Churchill and Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, met and discussed the idea of a post-war international organization.
The new international organisation was formulated and negotiated amongst the delegations from the Allied Big Four at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference from 21 September to 7 October 1944. They agreed on proposals for the aims, structure and functioning of the new organization.[28][29][30] It took the conference at Yalta in February 1945, and further negotiations with the Soviet Union, before all the issues were resolved.[31]
By 1 March 1945, 21 additional states had signed the Declaration by the United Nations.[32] After months of planning, the UN Conference on International Organization opened in San Francisco on 25 April 1945. It was attended by 50 nations' governments and a number of non-governmental organizations.[33][34][35] The delegations of the Big Four chaired the plenary meetings.[36] Previously, Churchill had urged Roosevelt to restore France to its status of a major power after the liberation of Paris in August 1944. The drafting of the Charter of the United Nations was completed over the following two months, and it was signed on 26 June 1945 by the representatives of the 50 countries.[37][38] The UN officially came into existence on 24 October 1945, upon ratification of the Charter by the five permanent members of the Security Council: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union and China — and by a majority of the other 46 nations.[39]
The first meetings of the General Assembly, with 51 nations represented,[lower-alpha 1] and the Security Council took place in London beginning in January 1946.[39] Debates began at once, covering topical issues such as the presence of Russian troops in Iranian Azerbaijan and British forces in Greece.[42] British diplomat Gladwyn Jebb served as interim secretary-general.
The General Assembly selected New York City as the site for the headquarters of the UN. Construction began on 14 September 1948 and the facility was completed on 9 October 1952. The Norwegian Foreign Minister, Trygve Lie, was the first elected UN secretary-general.[39]
Though the UN's primary mandate was peacekeeping, the division between the United States and the Soviet Union often paralysed the organization; generally allowing it to intervene only in conflicts distant from the Cold War.[43] Two notable exceptions were a Security Council resolution on 7 July 1950 authorizing a US-led coalition to repel the North Korean invasion of South Korea, passed in the absence of the Soviet Union,[39][44] and the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement on 27 July 1953.[45]
On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly approved a resolution to partition Palestine, approving the creation of Israel.[46] Two years later, Ralph Bunche, a UN official, negotiated an armistice to the resulting conflict.[47] On 7 November 1956, the first UN peacekeeping force was established to end the Suez Crisis;[48] however, the UN was unable to intervene against the Soviet Union's simultaneous invasion of Hungary, following the country's revolution.[49]
On 14 July 1960, the UN established the United Nations Operation in the Congo (or UNOC), the largest military force of its early decades, to bring order to Katanga, restoring it to the control of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by 11 May 1964.[50] While travelling to meet rebel leader Moise Tshombe during the conflict, Dag Hammarskjöld, often named as one of the UN's most effective secretaries-general,[51] died in a plane crash. Months later he was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.[52] In 1964, Hammarskjöld's successor, U Thant, deployed the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, which would become one of the UN's longest-running peacekeeping missions.[53]
With the spread of decolonization in the 1960s, the UN's membership shot up due to an influx of newly independent nations. In 1960 alone, 17 new states joined the UN, 16 of them from Africa.[48] On 25 October 1971, with opposition from the United States, but with the support of many Third World nations, the People's Republic of China was given the Chinese seat on the Security Council in place of the Republic of China (also known as Taiwan). The vote was widely seen as a sign of waning American influence in the organization.[54] Third World nations organized themselves into the Group of 77 under the leadership of Algeria, which briefly became a dominant power at the UN.[55] On 10 November 1975, a bloc comprising the Soviet Union and Third World nations passed a resolution, over strenuous American and Israeli opposition, declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. The resolution was repealed on 16 December 1991, shortly after the end of the Cold War.[56][57]
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 secondary goals of economic development and cultural exchange.[58] By the 1970s, the UN budget for social and economic development was far greater than its peacekeeping budget.
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After the Cold War, the UN saw a radical expansion in its peacekeeping duties, taking on more missions in five years than it had in the previous four decades.[59] Between 1988 and 2000, the number of adopted Security Council resolutions more than doubled, and the peacekeeping budget increased by more than tenfold.[60][61][62] 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.[63] In 1991, the UN authorized a US-led coalition that repulsed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.[64] Brian Urquhart, the under-secretary-general of the UN from 1971 to 1985, later described the hopes raised by these successes as a "false renaissance" for the organization, given the more troubled missions that followed.[65]
Beginning in the last decades of the Cold War, critics of the UN condemned the organization for perceived mismanagement and corruption.[66] In 1984, American President Ronald Reagan withdrew the United States' funding from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (or UNESCO) over allegations of mismanagement, followed by the United Kingdom and Singapore.[67][68] Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general from 1992 to 1996, initiated a reform of the Secretariat, somewhat reducing the size of the organisation.[69][70] His successor, Kofi Annan, initiated further management reforms in the face of threats from the US to withhold its UN dues.[70]
Though the UN Charter had been written primarily to prevent aggression by one nation against another, in the early 1990s the UN faced several simultaneous, serious crises within Somalia, Haiti, Mozambique, and the nations that previously made up Yugoslavia.[71] The UN mission in Somalia was widely viewed as a failure after the United States' withdrawal following casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu. The UN mission to Bosnia faced worldwide ridicule for its indecisive and confused mission in the face of ethnic cleansing.[72] In 1994, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda failed to intervene in the Rwandan genocide amidst indecision in the Security Council.[73]
From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, international interventions authorized by the UN took a wider variety of forms. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 authorised the NATO-led Kosovo Force beginning in 1999. The UN mission in the Sierra Leone Civil War was supplemented by a British military intervention. The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was overseen by NATO.[74] In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq despite failing to pass a UN Security Council resolution for authorization, prompting a new round of questioning of the UN's effectiveness.[75]
Under the eighth secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, the UN intervened with peacekeepers in crises such as the War in Darfur in Sudan and the Kivu conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and sent observers and chemical weapons inspectors to the Syrian Civil War.[76] In 2013, an internal review of UN actions in the final battles of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009 concluded that the organization had suffered a "systemic failure".[77] In 2010, the organization suffered the worst loss of life in its history, when 101 personnel died in the Haiti earthquake.[78] Acting under the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 in 2011, NATO countries intervened in the First Libyan Civil War.
The Millennium Summit was held in 2000 to discuss the UN's role in the 21st century.[79] The three-day meeting was the largest gathering of world leaders in history, and it culminated in the adoption by all member states of the Millennium Development Goals (or MDGs), a commitment to achieve international development in areas such as poverty reduction, gender equality and public health. Progress towards these goals, which were to be met by 2015, was ultimately uneven. The 2005 World Summit reaffirmed the UN's focus on promoting development, peacekeeping, human rights and global security.[80] The Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs) were launched in 2015 to succeed the Millennium Development Goals.[81]
In addition to addressing global challenges, the UN has sought to improve its accountability and democratic legitimacy by engaging more with civil society and fostering a global constituency.[82] In an effort to enhance transparency, in 2016 the organization held its first public debate between candidates for secretary-general.[83] On 1 January 2017, Portuguese diplomat António Guterres, who had previously served as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, became the ninth secretary-general. Guterres has highlighted several key goals for his administration, including an emphasis on diplomacy for preventing conflicts, more effective peacekeeping efforts, and streamlining the organization to be more responsive and versatile to international needs.[84]
On 13 June 2019, the UN signed a Strategic Partnership Framework with the World Economic Forum in order to "jointly accelerate" the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.[85]
The United Nations is part of the broader UN System, which includes an extensive network of institutions and entities. Central to the organization are five principal organs established by the UN Charter: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice and the UN Secretariat.[86] A sixth principal organ, the Trusteeship Council, suspended its operations on 1 November 1994 upon the independence of Palau; the last remaining UN trustee territory.[87]
Four of the five principal organs are located at the main UN Headquarters in New York City, while the International Court of Justice is seated in The Hague.[88] Most other major agencies are based in the UN offices at Geneva,[89] Vienna,[90] and Nairobi,[91] and additional UN institutions are located throughout the world. The six official languages of the UN, used in intergovernmental meetings and documents, are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.[92] On the basis of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, the UN and its agencies are immune from the laws of the countries where they operate, safeguarding the UN's impartiality with regard to host and member countries.[93]
Below the six organs are, in the words of the author Linda Fasulo, "an amazing collection of entities and organizations, some of which are actually older than the UN itself and operate with almost complete independence from it".[94] These include specialized agencies, research and training institutions, programmes and funds and other UN entities.
