UN

C

Membership

Under the charter, UN membership is open to all “peace-loving” states that accept the obligations of the organization. The 50 nations that attended the San Francisco conference, with the addition of Poland, became founding members of the UN. Until 1971 China was represented by a delegation from the Nationalist government of Taiwan; in October of that year, however, the General Assembly voted to seat the delegation from the People's Republic of China in its stead.

New members are admitted by a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council. Since 1945, membership has increased more than threefold, mainly with the admission of many new African and Asian countries that had been European colonies. As of mid-2006, the UN had 192 members.

D

Organization

The charter established six principal UN organs: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat.

All member states are represented in the General Assembly, which is the main deliberative body of the UN. The General Assembly meets annually in regular sessions and in special sessions at the request of a majority of its members or of the Security Council. The assembly has no enforcement authority; its resolutions are recommendations to member states that carry the political and moral force of majority approval but lack the power of mandatory implementation. The charter, however, permits the assembly to establish agencies and programmes to carry out its recommendations; among the most important of these are the following: the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

The Security Council, which is in continuous session, is the UN's central organ for maintaining peace. The council has 15 members, of which 5—China, France, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States—have been accorded permanent seats. Periodically proposals have been made for new permanent members to be added (for example, Germany, Japan), and old ones removed (for example, France, Britain) to reflect the changing balance of world power, but to date no substantive revision has been made and the lack of reform of the Security Council is a source of frustration in some capitals, even threatening to erode the organ’s legitimacy. Nonpermanent members serve for two years, with five new members elected by the General Assembly every year. Decisions of the council require nine votes, including the concurring votes (or abstinence from voting) of the permanent members on substantive issues. This rule of “great-power unanimity” does not apply to procedural matters.

The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which meets annually, has 54 members; 18 members are elected each year by the General Assembly for 3-year terms. ECOSOC coordinates the economic and social activities of the UN and its specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO); the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); and the International Labour Organization (ILO). In practice, ECOSOC's functions are limited because each specialized agency is organized separately and is governed by its own constitution and elected bodies; the agencies submit annual reports to ECOSOC. The UN and the specialized agencies together are called the United Nations System.

The Trusteeship Council originally was responsible for supervising 11 territories placed under international trust at the end of World War II. By the early 1990s all of the original trust territories had been dissolved, and all of the dependencies had achieved either full sovereignty or self-government as part of a larger state. The remaining trusteeship, the Palau Islands, became an independent republic in 1994, and the Trusteeship Council suspended its operations and effectively ceased to exist. Other colonial questions have been transferred to the General Assembly and special subsidiary bodies.

The International Court of Justice, situated in The Hague, the Netherlands, is the judicial body of the UN. The court hears cases referred to it by UN members, who retain the right to decide whether they will accept the court's ruling as binding. When asked to do so by the UN, its principal organs, or the specialized agencies, the International Court of Justice may also render advisory opinions. Fifteen judges sit as members of the court; they are elected for 9-year terms by the General Assembly and the Security Council.

The Secretariat serves the other UN organs and carries out the programmes and policies of the organization. The body is headed by the secretary-general, who is appointed by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council. Since the founding of the UN eight secretaries-general have held office: Trygve Lie (Norway), 1946-1953; Dag Hammarskjöld (Sweden), 1953-1961; U Thant (Burma), 1961-1971; Kurt Waldheim (Austria), 1972-1981; Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (Peru), 1982-1991; Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Egypt), 1992-1996; Kofi Annan (Ghana), 1997-2006; and Ban Ki-moon (South Korea), beginning in 2007.

E

Financing

The UN's operating costs are met by contributions from member states in accordance with a scale of assessments approved by the General Assembly. Only the regular budget, constituting ongoing activities under the charter, is covered by fixed assessments; special programmes such as UNICEF and the UNDP are usually financed through voluntary contributions. For the year of 2003, the regular budget appropriations totalled approximately US$1.569 billion. Most members paid less than 1 per cent of the budget; only 15 countries contributed more than 1 per cent. The largest contributor was the United States with 22 per cent. Of the other members, only Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, and Germany contributed more than 2 per cent. In the mid-1980s the UN underwent a serious financial crisis. Many member states, including the United States and the USSR, withheld part of their contributions due to national fiscal problems and dissatisfaction with certain aspects of the UN system. While the immediate crisis was overcome through the emergency reallocation of resources, the then Secretary-General Kofi Annan still complained of the UN’s “persistent state of near-bankruptcy”.

III

The UN and Peace and Security

Under the charter, the Security Council is primarily responsible for matters of peace and security, with the General Assembly retaining only residual authority. Articles 33-38 of the charter authorize the Security Council to encourage disputing nations to settle their differences through peaceful means, including negotiations, inquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, and judicial settlement. In carrying out this responsibility, the council may delegate representatives or set up special committees to investigate disputes and recommend means of settlement.

When the council determines that a dispute threatens peace, it may, under Articles 39-51, enforce its recommendations, either by non-military means, such as economic or diplomatic sanctions, or by the use of military forces. This is the only place where the charter authorizes enforcement action. Such action is subject to the concurring votes of the five permanent council members, however, and thus emphasizes the significance of the great-power veto on important issues. Military action is also subject to the availability of armed forces, a condition that has been difficult to fulfil.

Finally, under Article 26, the Security Council is responsible for formulating plans “for the establishment of a system for the regulation of armaments”. The UN Charter places less emphasis on international arms control and disarmament as means of achieving peace than did the League of Nations Covenant. Because of events between the two world wars, many world leaders concluded that peace could be achieved only through the cooperation of the major powers acting, as Roosevelt put it, as the world's “policemen”. This idea is incorporated in the requirement for great-power unanimity; it also explains why the charter has been called a system of “limited” collective security, as enforcement action cannot be taken against the will of any country that holds a permanent seat on the council.

A

Impact of the Cold War

Shortly after World War II and the establishment of the UN, political cooperation among the major powers—and especially between the United States and the USSR—broke down, and the world entered into the period of the Cold War. As the interests of the United States and the USSR clashed, the ability of the UN to maintain peace was limited.

Under Article 43 of the charter, the Security Council was to negotiate agreements with member states to provide military units that could enforce its decisions. Negotiations, which began in 1946, soon became deadlocked on questions of the size, composition, and stationing of military forces. These differences were never settled.

A similar stalemate soon developed in the UN Atomic Energy Commission, created by the first resolution passed by the General Assembly on January 24, 1946. The commission's mandate was to develop a system to control atomic energy and limit it to peaceful uses. The United States presented a comprehensive plan for international control of atomic energy, including an agreement to dispose of its own nuclear weapons and facilities once an international system for inspection became operative. The USSR insisted that the United States destroy all existing nuclear weapons immediately and objected to any international inspection as an infringement on national sovereignty. Again, the differences between the two nations proved irreconcilable.

The original intentions of the charter—to create an effective system of collective security—have, in fact, never been implemented. The Security Council was not completely stalled, however; it was able to bring about the settlement of disputes, largely through mediation and good offices, in situations in which the interests of the permanent members, especially the United States and the USSR, converged. One such case involved the withdrawal of the Dutch from Indonesia in 1949; another in that same year concerned ending the Six-Day War in 1967. In 1950, however, strong differences arose among the great powers when forces from North Korea attacked South Korea, precipitating the Korean War.