This past Saturday, Dartmouth hosted its first annual Model United Nations conference for high schools. The existence of the conference itself raised the key question of the United Nations' current relevance in the real world.
Due to globalization, our world is often described with platitudinal phrases like "increasingly interconnected" or "global village." Although these words may have become clich, the phenomenon they represent is all too real. The world is indeed becoming smaller and more tight-knit, and it is increasingly difficult for individual countries to resist globalization's pull. As we pay more and more attention to the global, and frame more of our thinking in terms of the world as a whole, the role of international organizations is being considered with increasing frequency.
The United Nations, as the best-known and most pervasive of all international groups, lends itself particularly well to such scrutiny. Several incidents over the past 15 years, such as its failure to prevent the 1994 Rwanda genocide or the 1995 massacre of Bosnians in Srebrenica, have highlighted some of the organization's serious flaws. Other more recent events, like its inability to prevent unilateral military action in Iraq, were perceived by some as signs of the U.N.'s impotence.
It may be true that the United Nations is not significant to global security. However, I feel like we focus too much on security, and forget that the U.N. has played -- and continues to play -- an important role in human rights, global health, aid and development and environmental realms. The United Nations' greatest contribution lies in recognizing an issue as a problem which must be dealt with globally, and in mobilizing global forces to address it.
The U.N. is of great significance in the promotion and protection of human rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the organization's basic rights document. Unlike the United States' constitution, which emphasizes negative rights, the Declaration contains mostly positive rights, such as the "right to work," the "right to education," and the "right to take part in the government of one's country." Although the complete attainment of many of these is very difficult -- in most cases impossible -- the Declaration is important as a baseline standard for the civil, economic and social rights of peoples across the world. A glaring disregard for these rights should serve as an alarm for human rights violations to the global community.
The United Nations is also indispensable in addressing issues of global health. The World Health Organization has played a key role in the eradication of smallpox, saving 2 to 3 million lives (which were annually claimed by the disease as recently as the 1960s) and $1 billion dollars in vaccination expenses each year. Currently, the United Nations is aiming to stamp out polio. It succeeded in doing so in the Western Hemisphere in 1991, and is expected to succeed globally in the next three years.
The United Nations is also currently the most important agent addressing global developmental and humanitarian issues. The U.N.'s contribution is significant because it recognizes the need to address them together. For example, the World Food Programme, which provides one- third of the world's emergency food assistance, combines its relief and rehabilitation efforts with development operations, and strives to "allow the weak and the poor to stop worrying about their next meal and build a sustainable future."
Sustainable development and the environment form another set of problems which the United Nations has brought to the forefront of the global agenda. The United Nations Environment Programme has been instrumental in crafting and implementing the Montreal Protocol, a successful ozone-layer protection regime. Although the impetus for the Protocol came from the United States, it was the U.N. which turned ozone-layer depletion into an international issue and established a global strategy to manage it.
"Ensur[ing] environmental sustainability" is just one of eight United Nations Millenium Development Goals, a set of objectives which the organization aspires to achieve by 2015. These goals show the United Nations' intentions, which are, unlike those of any nation, truly altruistic in nature. However, the problems it strives to address -- such as poverty, the AIDS pandemic and gender inequality -- are gargantuan in scale and closely linked to one another, and thereby present great obstacles to finding and effectively implementing feasible solutions. Despite these hindrances, the United Nations makes good use of the current trends of globalization and to this day remains a relevant international force.
