The UN at 80: Still humanity’s most important organisation but member states deliberately destroy it

Editorial for Transcend Media Service, TMS, and published in an edited Q & A version by the China Social Science Network-China Social Science News.

See also this follow-up, “Condemn all UN member states: They spend 100 times more on militarism than on the entire UN system.”

The UN has been extremely important over the last 80 years in terms of, for instance, global dialogue, multi-dimensional development, international law, peace-keeping, normativity, violence condemnation, and ethics. It has been the place to hold member states accountable.

The UN Charter is the most Gandhian document ever signed by the world’s governments. If the great majority of member states lived up to their obligations in accordance with the UN Charter and including the resolutions they have signed up to, the world would be a much more peaceful, just, democratic, and lawful place.

Regrettably, there are several reasons why the world is not in accordance with those fine Charter norms and provisions:
a) The majority of states are nationalistic and do not accept supra-national bodies that could limit their ‘national interests,’
b) the general member state conceptualisation of defence and security is based on offensive deterrence, which prioritizes offensive weapons and unavoidably create the classical ‘security dilemma’ which leads to ever higher armament levels and risks of violence instead of true peace. Additionally, weapons of mass destruction are incompatible with several provisions, the clearest being the Charter’s Article 1 – that peace shall be established by peaceful means and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (2017).

One may mention two other reasons, namely:

c) Civilian conflict-resolution, mediation, reconciliation and similar concepts and policies are by and large ignored because most governments are woefully lacking in knowledge about these matters. Security means preparing for war, not preparing for cooperation, dialogue, mediation and negotiated solutions. And then:

d) Member states spend a total of 300-400 times more on their military than on what the United Nations and all its family organizations do.

As if this were not bad enough, here is what the UN itself points out, namely that “according to information provided by the UN Controller to the General Assembly’s Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary), only $1.8 billion has been received against the $3.5 billion regular budget assessments for 2025 – a shortfall of around 50 per cent.”

It should be obvious that the world’s government priorities militate against every idea about a less violent and war-ridden world. In 2024, the world spent US$ 2700 billion on the military.

There are other reasons, but these are enough to make the point that the main fault is with the member states and their behaviour rather than with the United Nations as a global institution.

If the member states wanted it to be what its founding intellectuals wanted it to be, it would be completely different from today’s UN.

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Most international organizations have preambles that make peace their overriding norms and goal, often with explicit reference to the UN Charter. One example is the EU, another NATO. NATO’s treaty is pretty much a copy of the UN Charter expanded with Article 5 about mutual military assistance in case of an attack on a NATO member. It also states that all conflicts shall be referred to the UN.

However, since NATO bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 in its first ‘out of area’ operation and lacking a UN mandate, it has operated principles, concepts and policies that can be summarized as a 24/7 violation of its own treaty.

In today’s dark militarist times, the word ‘peace’ is nothing but window dressing. Virtually no government has any capacity to solve conflicts through diplomacy and other civilian means – to make peace by peaceful means. I have argued elsewhere that the world is more conflict and peace illiterate than ever.

Since peace considerations have been de facto cancelled in Western politics, media and research, it can safely be predicted that the fact that the UN – humanity’s most important organization – turns 80, will cause very little attention celebration among the 12% of humanity who live in the West. Western media is likely to pay much more attention to NATO’s 80^th anniversary in 2029. However, the UN will be celebrated by many in the non-Western parts of the world.

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For decades, a lot of research, dialogues and civil society activism has produced brilliant proposals for UN reforms and, related to them, discussed what the future world needs in terms of global governance and cooperation. For someone who has followed them all for equally many decades, there is only one conclusion to be drawn: The West does not have any vision for the future in general or for the UN’s future in particular, does not want to share power with others through a reformed UN and wants to keep on dominating the world. It seems blind to the fact that it is in rapid decline and bound to fall in terms of ethics, economics, politics, legitimacy, culture, technology, education, research and in terms of respect for international law and even it’s own civilisational values.

Thus, the last the US/West would like to see is a shared global future with a strong United Nations. At what point – and how – it will recognise that its struggle for global one-polar dominance is hopeless and that ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ remains to be seen. But it is not going to be a cosy tea party.

What reform are mentioned in UN circles?  

The “UN80 Initiative” centers on three priorities: enhancing operational efficiency, assessing how mandates – or key tasks – from Member States are implemented, and exploring structural reforms across the UN system. Of course, these are important issues and the UN certainly needs to be updated, made more efficient and pursue better management.

However, such priorities apply to lots of other international organisations too, but the UN is both the one singled out as “outdated” or “bureaucratic” and also the one that has to survive on woefully inadequate funds given its extremely complex global mandate.

Compare with NATO which does not even discuss reform and rests on a manifestly outdated offensive military ‘defence’ and a right to First Use of nuclear weapons, a gigantic bureaucracy that, when it has a summit, is basically a stage-set theatre performance with fashion, cosy family smiles, jokes, staged press conferences and other meetings where each actors has been instructed beforehand about exactly what to say and not to say – and they all state the same banalities as if Russia had already started its tanks rolling towards the Eifel Tower and Brussels. The final summit declaration is written before the meeting, it is brief and only states that the Alliance has decided to increase its military expenditures to 5% of GNP – a measure I believe I am still the only one to have fundamentally criticized as the intellectual nonsense it is:
https://thetransnational.substack.com/p/natos-5-of-gdp-military-expenditures 

This happens while the UN must move to cheaper location worldwide, perhaps abandoning partly or in whole its second HQ in Geneva. In passing I would suggest that the UN HQ in New York is moved out of the US that no longer deserves to be the host of it.

The 80th UN Anniversary would better be celebrated by launching various elements of a new vision for the UN in the future world and by the UN leadership requiring much more solidarity and increased funding from its members as well as simple respect for the norms, values and articles of the Charter.

But that would, among many other things, require a UN Secretary-General more like Dag Hammarskjöld or Kofi Annan than the present, very decent and soft-spoken António Guterres who would hardly activate the Charter’s Articles 99 and 100 about the power he actually has and demand of member states that they enable him and his secretariat to perform all the tasks they demand that the UN shall do and achieve almost against all odds created by the self-same members. They instead submit blurred mandates and shamelessly small funds.

The UN is in need of many reforms and updating; anybody turning 80 is. But the UN’s first S-G, Norwegian Trygve Lie, was absolutely correct in pointing out that the UN will only be as strong, efficient and world-improving as the member states want it to be.

The US and other Western members have not only marginalised the UN systematically for decades, they have also conducted policies which amount to a total violation of everything the UN stands for and seeks to achieve. The US/West has even introduced its own “rules-based international order” and – with Israel – considers itself “exceptionalist” in not being bound by international law as we know it in general and the UN Charter in particular. The Gaza Genocide and the Israeli and US aggression on Iran speaks volumes of the rogue contempt for the UN and international law.

It is well-known that the Security Council must be reformed, the General Assembly invigorated, perhaps a new peoples’ Assembly – so the UN could become more “We, the peoples” and not only “We, the – unelected – government representatives,” and that security also includes the environment, etc.

There is an obvious need for a much stronger UN Peace-Keeping Organisation and an Intervention Force under UN – not NATO – command in accordance with Chapter 7 – when every civilian step has been tried and found in vain.

We are not revealing a secret by saying that it is various member states who oppose all these common-sense ideas that would be eminently possible if member states were members for the UN and not only of or against it.

In my view, China is the only large and important power that speaks up and conducts policies with fundamental respect for the UN Charter. One only has to point to China’s adherence to the brilliant Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence (embedded in its constitution) and its visionary Initiatives for A Shared Future, Civilisation, Development and Security.

That said, it is, however, also almost US$ 600 million behind with this year’s funding pledges and is only the 8^th largest contributor to UN Peace-Keeping.

Furthermore, it can also safely be argued that projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, BRI, is in fine alignment with the basic UN principles; cooperation for mutual and equal benefit is highly likely to contribute to violence- and war-prevention and, in the longer perspective, become perhaps the most important single peace project in the new multi-polar world humanity is longing to see come about.