#Reforming the #United #Nations

First one important question, which body has the ability to reform the United Nations? Is it the General Assembly? If not it should have that ability as the closest thing to a world parliament. The members should be able to improve the institution to prevent petrification. 

The UN will never be a calm, orderly place because no large council representing sovereign states or provinces can be. That’s the cost of allowing divergent ideas.  It will also always suffer from the inevitable bureaucracy of large institutions, which sometimes serves to put the brakes on haste, bad decisions.  However, there are three things that could be done to greatly progress it toward effectiveness at its stated purposes. 

The quickest and most important, but perhaps hardest, fix for the UN is reformation of the so-called Security Council. Giving the most powerful members vetoes might have been a good idea during the Cold War when there were essentially two sides, but now it just allows one member to hold the world hostage.  If the principle was for the big powers to have greater say, then a weighted vote would work better; say each gets two votes to the one for other members.  Eventually the permanent seats should go, but that might raise the difficulty of reform from extremely hard to impossible to achieve. This would force the members to negotiate, maybe even work together, rather than relying on obstruction.  Of course it would take the weight of the General Assembly to force the tiny Security Council to reform.

The second thing that has to be done, if it isn’t already the case, is to make the World Court part of the UN and legitimized by a majority of members so it becomes applicable to all. This would lead into the third thing which is bringing Interpol, or whatever it is called these days, into the UN as part of the international legal system. Stick with limiting the military capabilities to peacekeeping but give the World Court and UN some legal teeth against war criminals, terrorists, international criminals, global tax evasion schemes, etc. Then America wouldn’t have to use a military to act like the world police because there would actually be such a force. 

These three reforms could go a long way toward improving the effectiveness of the United Nations and push it a little more toward living up to its name. If the General Assembly has any power to reform the place, but if the real power is the Security Council as presently run, it won’t happen. 

  

 

Everything is Always in Process

Only Compassion Defeats Dehumanization