Dan Rather, Contributor
AMID THE ruin and destruction and death that the Second World War left behind, 51 nations banded together in 1945 to form the United Nations. Now, nearly 60 years later, amid charges of corruption and irrelevance, the world body is trying to remake itself. Can it?
If the permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council looks like a time capsule of the world order in the immediate post-World War II years, it is in no way an accident. The term "United Nations" was coined by Franklin Roosevelt in 1942, while World War II raged still, to describe the Allies fighting the Axis powers. That was when the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and China made a pact under the name to make no separate peace with Germany and Japan.
When the United Nations as we know it was established, these four -- along with newly liberated France -- granted themselves permanent, veto-wielding seats at the core of the new body. This was to be the great powers' instrument for steering the world on its new course. But history had different plans, and it wasn't long before tensions between the United States and the U.S.S.R. led to fighting in the captains' tower.
The United Nations held together despite -- and perhaps even because of -- the rifts of the Cold War. But the forces of our current historical moment are posing new, fundamental challenges to the world organisation. On one side of the power ledger, the United States stands alone as a full-service, economic and military superpower. On the other side is a changed world in which defeated Axis nations Germany and Japan have grown mighty, in which the growing nuclear club has given nations such as India and Pakistan a voice that must be heard, and in which the locus of international tensions has shifted from Europe to the Middle East.
INTERNAL PRESSURES
The run-up to the Iraq War exposed these internal pressures more than it created them. And now that they are out in the open, and the U.S. voices questioning why they should worry about what the United Nations thinks are gaining volume, the international organisation is taking a long, hard look in the mirror. A recent report to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan outlined two proposals for overhauling the Security Council to reflect the world's new realities. Both would expand the size of the Council beyond its current five permanent and 10 rotating members. One would add six new permanent members.
In a clear response to the feuding over Iraq, and to American assertions of its right to act without the United Nations when the United States says its security is at stake, the report also considered circumstances under which the threats posed by terrorism and nuclear weapons could call for U.N.-sanctioned pre-emptive war.
But no matter what the proposals, the old and frayed World War II alliance at the heart of the United Nations will remain, and will have the final say on which changes are enacted. As its members have veto power over Security Council decisions, how could it be otherwise? The world has gone through huge and often cataclysmic changes since 1945, and now it faces threats from stateless terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the AIDS pandemic.
One thing, however, has not changed in six decades: Those who wield power are unlikely to surrender it willingly. Will the United Nations' key members put aside their divisions and individual interests to remake the body for the 21st century? The panel that prepared the report for Secretary-General Annan might have provided an unwitting answer: It offered two proposals for overhauling the Security Council because it was unable to agree on one.
Dan Rather is a television broadcaster (c) 2004 DJR Inc. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
