UN Day: 60 years of Success and Failures

The international community today are commemorating the work for peace and prosperity of the United Nations. Scholars are reminicising about the organization's past and ponder it's future. With recent changes for the need for reform, some wonder if the United Nations is still relevant today.

On a recent edition of the US radio program, The Tavis Smiley Show, Christopher O’Sullivan, author of The United Nations: A Concise History and Pedro Sanjuan, author of The UN Gang: A Memoir of Incompetence, Corruption, Espionage, Anti-Semitism, and Islamic Extremism at the UN Secretariat discussed the challenged that face the United Nations today.

O'Sullivan brought some historical context to the conversation. He says that when the UN was first created in 1945, the world had just come out of two world wars with over 75 million lives lost. Former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his comtemporaries wanted to create an institution where conflicts could be resolved peacefully.

Sanjuan argues that while the UN has done some good things for the world, the organization is marginalized, mainly in part because of post colonialism and the Cold War. The creators of the UN didn't anticipate that most of Africa, Latin America and Asia would be decolonized 20 years later. He feels that this is why the UN is not as effective as it could be.

Sanjuan also recommended that reform is badly needed at the UN. He gave the example of the Oil-for-Food program and the secrecy around it.

"The UN should not be a secret organization," said Sanjuan. "It is the property of 191 countries. People should be able to look at the books. It needs reform not because it is corrupt, but because it is ineffectual."

O'Sullivan argues that while that the reform initiatives are only coming from Western states. The Global South he states would like to see more economic reforms that would be more effective for their countries.

"Reform is in the eye of the beholder," said O'Sullivan.