II.

Development of the UN

The United Nations is usually considered the successor to the League of Nations, the international organization formed after World War I to serve many of the same purposes. The League, however, failed to maintain peace and grew progressively weaker in the years just before World War II.

A.

Origins

The first commitment to establish a new international organization was made in the Atlantic Charter, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain on August 14, 1941, at a conference held on a warship off the coast of Newfoundland. They pledged to establish a “wider and permanent system of general security” and expressed their desire “to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field”. The principles of the Atlantic Charter were more widely accepted in the Declaration by United Nations, signed on January 1, 1942, by representatives of 26 allied nations that were fighting against the Axis powers during World War II. In this document the term United Nations, suggested by Roosevelt, was first used formally.

Direct action to form the new organization was taken at a 1943 conference in Moscow. On October 30, representatives of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Great Britain, China, and the United States signed a declaration in which they recognized the need to establish “at the earliest practicable date a general international organization”. Meeting in Tehran a month later, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin reaffirmed “the supreme responsibility resting upon us and all the United Nations to make a peace which will…banish the scourge and terror of war”.

Following up on the Moscow declaration, representatives of the four powers met at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., in the autumn of 1944, to work out a series of proposals for an international organization. They agreed on a draft charter that specified its purposes, structure, and methods of operation, but they could not agree on a method of voting in the proposed Security Council, which was to have the major responsibility for peace and security.

The voting issue was settled at the Yalta conference in February 1945, when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met for the last of their wartime negotiating summits. Essentially, the Soviet leader accepted the Anglo-American position that limited great-power prerogatives on procedural matters, but retained the right of veto on substantive issues. At the same time, the allied leaders called for a conference of United Nations to prepare the charter of the new organization.

Delegates from 50 nations met in San Francisco on April 25, 1945, for what was officially known as the United Nations Conference on International Organization. During a two-month period, they completed a charter consisting of 111 articles, based on the draft developed at Dumbarton Oaks. The charter was approved on June 25 and signed the next day; it became effective on October 24, 1945, after ratification by a majority of the signatories. The bonds of the wartime alliance against common enemies undoubtedly hastened agreement on establishing the new organization.

B.

Headquarters

On December 10, 1945, the United States Congress invited the UN to establish its headquarters in the United States. The organization accepted and in August 1946 moved to a temporary location in Lake Success, New York. Later that year a site was purchased bordering the East River in Manhattan, and plans for a permanent headquarters were drawn up. The site was granted a measure of extraterritoriality under an agreement between the United States and the UN. The complex, completed in mid-1952, includes the General Assembly Hall, the Secretariat Building, the Conference Building, and the Dag Hammarskjöld Library.

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”.