We have established a stunning array of international bodies to respond to the needs of the world’s women and children.

We have, because of our UN and its infrastructural underpinnings, created a central place where the governments of all nations — large and small — can meet in assembly, raise a common budget and empower international mechanisms (through the General Assembly and the ECOSOC) to seek to implement our common aims.

We have established a town meeting place of the world. Of course, it is imperfect. However, the fact is that the Assembly exists and is observed across the world — and highly respected in many countries. Yet it was not there in 1942.

Securing the world

We have a world Secretariat to coordinate the needs

How do we push for human rights except through the summoning of world opinion, pressure and Security Council sanctions?

and requests of all member states. We all too often criticize it. We always take it for granted.

But where was it when the Battles of Midway and Stalingrad were being fought?

We have a central, self-selected world security body that can be summoned day and night in the event of a new emergency and threat to international order. It is as strong or weak as its permanent members wish it to be.

Stabilizing weak states

At least, the Great Powers remain inside the tent. At best, they can do great things.

We have established international early-warning, assessment, response and coordination mechanisms for when states fray or collapse — and we are starting to work seriously on the matter of state re-building. Whoever thought on those lines in Mussolini’s time?

Monetary security

We have powerful international financial instruments in

We have a central, self-selected world security body that can be summoned day and night in the event of a new emergency and threat to international order.

play that, in their negative dimension, can detect, arrest, and turn around an economic crisis in a member state that might have serious spillover effects elsewhere — especially upon vulnerable neighbors.

There was nothing like this when the world’s banks started to collapse in the great 1931 crisis.

Would we really want our present, volatile fiscal and exchange systems without an IMF? I think not.

Helping the helpless

More positively, we have created myriad international agencies and mechanisms to assist poor- and medium-income economies in their endeavors to escape the poverty trap, transcend their demographic and environmental challenges and bring them fully into the community of prosperous nations, enjoying — but not damaged by — the world market.

We have established a stunning array of international bodies to respond to the needs of the world’s women and children, especially the poorest and most discriminated against. The early suffragettes and Victorian children’s rescue societies would have been amazed.

A healthier mentality

It is not a fair retort to say that much more needs to be done and that so many of the earth’s women and children still fall dismally behind.

The idea of an international civil society is vague, contested and always in flux — which is probably a good thing.

The fact is that a great deal has been done by an impressive mix of UN agencies working alongside NGOs, the churches and the liberal foundations. Ask any of the latter how the world would look without UNICEF and you would probably be rolled over.

We have established an international human rights regime that, for all its dreadful setbacks, may be the single most significant advance in our global mentality — in our way of thinking about the rights of others — since the campaigns against slavery.

Slowly but surely

Whatever beastly threats to freedom may occur in the future, the human rights agenda since the epic statements of 1945 and 1948 can never be eliminated. George Orwell’s hero-coward Winston Smith, in the novel 1984, was wrong.

We are steadily — and with setbacks and grudging opposition — setting up an international monitoring regime to protect our environments — local, national and global — and to safeguard future generations from the all-too-obvious harm that neglect of our ecologies can bring.

International civil society

Can any intelligent person hold that such cooperative

What idealists like Bunch and Eleanor Roosevelt had in common was a recognition that without institutions, rules and operating principles, our crooked humanity would not advance.

progress — or, rather, efforts to reverse the damage — can be done without international agencies?

We have, alongside all this institution building, witnessed the emergence of the idea of an international civil society. It is vague, contested and always in flux — which is probably a good thing.

It has developed thanks to the profound technological, economic, social and ideological transformations of the post-1945 era. And it has done so not apart from international institutions, but in conjunction with them, as part of a sort of second Enlightenment movement.

It criticizes the United Nations system on many grounds and walks hand-in-hand with it on others.

Who is "we"?

And who is the “we”? Certainly it has to be the world citizenry identified in “We the Peoples” — the men, women and children inhabiting this world.

But it is not an amorphous, anonymous mass of bodies — even if the majority of humans go through their lives in humble condition.

Optimism pays

It is also the many individuals who created and worked within our global institutions, the idealists like Bunche

How do we handle our collective human impact on the environment without multinational work?

and Urquhart and Cassin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Wangari Maathai and Mary Robinson, who knew that the world simply had to be a better place than it was before 1945.

Of course, they were overly optimistic. All who roll boulders uphill are. And what they all had in common was a recognition that without institutions, rules and operating principles, our crooked humanity would not advance.

The people's cry

There is more. The strongest argument for the continued validity and empowerment of the United Nations lies in the future and in humankind’s cry for help early in our present, disturbed new century.

Were all the globe to enjoy a condition like, say, the nations of Scandinavia — peace, prosperity, gender and generation equality, respect for the environment, the war drums throbbing no longer — we should probably require only technical support services like the International Telecommunication Union.

Much to be done

But the world is not so happy a place. Billions of people

NGO's, churches, liberal foundations — ask any of the latter how the world would look without UNICEF and you would probably be rolled over.

suffer impoverishment, many until the end of their miserable lives.

Population pressures build up — can we really offer justice and freedom from want to a mid-twenty-first-century earth of perhaps nine billion people, one-third of whom may live in squalor and desperation?

How do we handle our collective human impact on the environment — with its rising sea levels, collapsing glaciers and massive weather turbulences — without multinational work?

An international challenge

How do we manage global fiscal and trading dislocations without strengthening present UN instruments or creating new ones?

How do we push for the advancement of human rights and the displacement of awful dictatorships except through the summoning of world opinion, pressure and Security Council sanctions?

Don't give up

So the only answer, as far as I see it, is by trying — by repairing weaknesses, coaxing reluctant governments to accept change, understanding what works best and where international organization has problems — or even should not be involved at all — and not giving up.