We know that the creation of our world – the world of the past three decades – required America’s defeat of Soviet communism. It’s a world from which many have benefited but it’s also one that’s now deeply fractured, with the failures of past liberal interventions and the inequalities caused by a kind of globalization plain to see. And amidst a resurgence of deadly conflicts and mounting threats to international peace and security, the United Nations is practically no where to be seen.
This is not difficult to explain.
What’s important to realise is that our world – the “liberal international order” that seems now in decline – required not only the defeat of the USSR but also the quiet dismantling and then wilful forgetting of an earlier, more internationalist order, one centered on the United Nations and grounded in the understanding of its founders (men and women who twice in their adult lifetimes had witnessed catalysmic world wars, with 80 million dead, and an economic catastrophe in between), that in an atomic age, a different kind of international politics had to be possible.
The newly independent states of Asia and Africa, allied with the neutral nations of Europe and their many friends in America and elsewhere gave life to this project – not as a starry-eyed idealistic dream but as the practical machine essential to avert WW3.
The successes of the UN during this earlier time – from about the mid-1950s through the early 1990s – in unravelling empires, preventing and ending wars, and making possible global cooperation – were systematically undermined, then belittled, and finally erased from history.
The UN was deliberately turned away from its role as the world’s only universal instrument for peace.
All this was the result of different dynamics, all tied to the stories I try to tell in my new book, Peacemaker. I hope the thoughts above may be part of a continuing conversation on the history and future of the United Nations.
