ESSAY: From Seeds to System
The United Nations Charter
By Lawrence S. Finkelstein
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Reform has been a major theme of the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nations. In the run-up to the 2005 World Summit in September, the emphasis was mostly on the Organization’s flaws and its failure to adapt to changing times. Much of the criticism is justified. Serious attention has been and continues to be given to improving the work of the United Nations system. Concern about its credibility gives powerful impetus to the campaign to fix the flaws and reinvigorate the Organization. It is necessary that the effort succeed. Nevertheless, the history of its 60 years of existence may permit a brighter view. It begins when the Charter of the United Nations was adopted on 26 June 1945 during the United Nations Conference on International Organization, convened in San Francisco, and came into force on 24 October 1945 when enough ratifications had been received.
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| The signing ceremony of the United Nations Charter on 25 June 1945 at the San Francisco Opera House. UN photo |
It is noteworthy that the United States Senate voted 89 to 2 for ratification, and hopes that the Organization could ensure a peaceful and harmonious future were very high. During this great conference, the evidence of war was unmistakable. The streets continued to swarm with military personnel, even though the war in Europe ended halfway through the Conference. San Francisco Bay throbbed with the energy of naval vessels preparing to join the campaign against Japan—that war outlasted the Conference.
The setting is important in understanding what the United Nations was intended to be. Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States and Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom were the main proponents of a new start in organizing the world to do better than it had done between the end of the First World War and the outbreak of the Second World War. They wanted to avert a future like that of the past with its sequence of aggressions, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, the plunge into a war that was the greatest man-made disaster in human history, and the collapse of the League of Nations. They were idealists—and they were also realists. They agreed that at the centre of the new structure there had to be a great power nexus. At the heart of their plan were the great power policemen working together to maintain a post-war system of security and peace under law. For them, international peace and security was the dominant purpose. They needed the Soviet Union in the great-power core. They also recognized that economic circumstances and human rights were important to their goal, but these were auxiliary not primary objectives.
The San Francisco Conference was deliberately not a peace conference. It was purposefully scheduled before the war ended so that the structure for post-war peace could be established before there was such a peace to protect. Thus, the United Nations would not suffer the League’s experience of being seen as responsible for contested peace terms in the Versailles Treaty of which the League of Nations Covenant was a part.
The UN Charter aimed to improve on the League’s provisions for maintaining international peace and security. Chapter VI of the Charter required Member States to resolve their disputes peacefully, and that rule was to be enforced under its Chapter VII provisions, giving the Security Council authority which the League did not have to enforce peace when faced with threats or breaches of peace or with acts of aggression. These criteria for intervention were much more pragmatic and less legalistic than the League provisions. The Security Council was empowered to apply sanctions against violators, even to use armed force in extreme cases. The Charter also required Member States to commit military forces and support to be available for Council deployment. This was not to be a “standing UN army”; rather, it sought to have appropriate national forces standing by, committed and available for UN service when needed. That useful provision remains unused in the Charter; it might serve the Organization and the world today, although the purposes for which the United Nations may need forces are very different from what was originally envisioned.
In the same pragmatic vein, the UN Charter recognized the necessity of great power cooperation. For one thing, the word “democracy” does not appear either as a condition of membership or a goal of the United Nations. The Soviet Union was needed in the Organization even though it was by no means a democracy. The veto power of the five permanent members of the Security Council is another part of that picture. It proscribed the catastrophe of the United Nations making war against a great military power. It also assured that the Organization could not compel these five permanent members to act unless they agreed to do so. And, perhaps most of all, the veto recognized the reality that if the United Nations was to fulfil the hopes of mankind, the major countries would have to collaborate with each other. Robert Burns foresaw the epitaph: “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men, Gang aft a-gley”.
The cold war shattered the hope of great power collaboration to carry out the UN Charter scheme for enforcing peace. The United Nations was consigned to secondary roles in the epic confrontation of the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the Charter was home to innovations that paved the way for unforeseen developments of the Organization’s role and contributions to the benefit of humanity. Other innovations were generated by the interaction of changing needs and responses to them over the 60 years of UN existence.
Some UN Charter innovations:
There is no veto in the General Assembly, whereas the League of Nations Covenant required unanimity in the Assembly. The League found it necessary to devise ways to evade that constricting rule; the UN Charter simply abolished it.
The Charter rested on the principle of State sovereignty protecting the domestic jurisdiction of States. From the outset, however, tension was generated by its references to “human rights” and “self-determination of peoples”—issues that were internationalized and became increasingly fair game for international attention. By 1948, the world was ready for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is not a treaty and non-binding on States. Nevertheless, it has gained acceptance as an authentic statement of human rights law and laid the basis for the subsequent binding “covenants” originating in the United Nations. The original intent that the Organization should merely “promote” but not “protect” human rights has given way to more assertive roles. Over time, international authority has prevailed over sovereignty to the point where the principle of “responsibility to protect” is gaining acceptance and authority. It affirms the obligation of States to protect their own populations against severe abuses and arguably the obligation of the outside world, especially the United Nations, to intervene when States do not.
On colonial issues, the UN Charter replaced the League of Nations mandates by a stronger trusteeship system for specified categories of territories. Of greater importance perhaps was the adoption of Chapter XI, which laid out the principles to govern the administration of all non-self-governing territories. The first session of the General Assembly in 1946 created an oversight body to receive and consider the information the UN Charter required from colonial powers. The Charter carefully balanced the numbers of colonial and non-colonial members in the Trusteeship Council. The General Assembly followed suit in the committee on non-self-governing territories. However, the more rapid than anticipated surge to independence and the admission of former colonies to UN membership had altered by 1960 the anti- and pro-colonialism balance in the Assembly, resulting in the assertion of a colonial right to independence. In 1961, the composition of the committee was flipped; thereafter, the anti-colonial faction was dominant.
Article 71 of the UN Charter set a precedent by authorizing the Economic and Social Council to make suitable arrangements for consultation with international and non-governmental organizations. NGOs have become indispensable to the performance of important United Nations economic and humanitarian roles, especially with respect to natural disasters and providing for refugees. However, NGOs relations with Governments are not without tensions in the Economic and Social Council, but their consultative roles have been expanding; and even the Security Council has found it valuable to arrange for such consultations.
The UN Secretariat was given status as a “principal organ” of the United Nations, alongside the General Assembly, the Councils and the International Court of Justice. Moreover, the Secretary-General gained a channel for influence from a mandate to make an annual report on the work of the Organization. He is also authorized to perform the potentially very important role of informing the Security Council of any matter that may pose a threat to international peace and security, which gives him a highly political, and thus hazardous, role. While that authority has seldom been used over the years, it has given the Secretary-General a basis for arranging a system to collect the information needed. Altogether, the UN Charter created an office of much greater significance and visibility than its predecessor enjoyed. Often, it is the Secretary-General that comes to mind when the United Nations is mentioned.
Some innovations in practice:
The veto rule in the UN Charter requires “the
concurring votes of the (five) permanent members” of the Security Council. Thus, abstentions are vetoes. In practice, the Council concluded quite early that it would not regard abstentions as vetoes. In effect, the Charter has been amended without fulfilling the onerous requirements of a formal amendment under Article 108. The result is healthy; a permanent member may avoid voting for a proposal without blocking its adoption.
Stymied by the cold war barrier to the Security Council’s performance of its role as enforcer of peace, the United Nations, out of necessity, invented the device of “peacekeeping”. The function is nowhere to be found in the Charter. It describes the interposition of impartial military contingents under UN auspices and command, sometimes unarmed, between States that either want to make peace or safeguard a peace already negotiated. The first instance was the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO)—created in 1948 to monitor truces negotiated by the UN Mediator between Israel and its Arab neighbours—which remains active to this day.
The first such operation to be labelled “peacekeeping” was the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF I), established in 1956. It had the extremely important roles of providing the justification to enable the United Kingdom, France and Israel to withdraw forces from the Egyptian territory they had occupied and thereafter supervise the ceasefire and serve as a buffer between Israel and Egypt. When UNEF had to withdraw in 1967, war ensued between Israel and Egypt. To date, there have been 60 UN peacekeeping operations, 17 of them still operative, coping mainly with internal conflicts rather than wars between States. Recently, the concept has been stretched to cover post-hostility restoration and reconstruction. Active forces number 67,000 military and civil police personnel, with an estimated annual budget of about $4.5 billion.
Even taking into account the very broad authority given to the Security Council by the Charter to deal with threats to peace and security, it is unlikely that the UN founders contemplated such authority being used to create international tribunals to deal with violence and humanitarian abuses, such as in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda. The United Nations created the International Criminal Court as a treaty-based tribunal with similar but worldwide jurisdiction. Their mandates to deal with violations of human rights law are a far cry from that of the International Court of Justice—the world Court—which can deal only with issues between States when they accept its jurisdiction.
In 1945, there were 51 members of the United Nations; currently there are 191. That growth results in good measure from the admission of former colonies and States emerging from the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. In practice, the United Nations has opted for the principle of universality, which is not what the UN Charter provides. Article 4 called for admission of peace-loving States that accept the Charter obligations and, “in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations”. By ignoring these criteria and forgoing the specified screening process, the Security Council and the General Assembly may well have increased the membership beyond what it would have been had the rules been followed.
The Charter does not authorize the United Nations to go operational. Yet, from the beginning, it conducted technical assistance projects—a function that grew in scale and fed into the creation of the United Nations Development Programme in 1965. Currently, it runs refugee encampments and provides food, water and other essentials to displaced people, such as in Darfur, Sudan. It succors the miserable victims of the 2004 tsunami and helps rebuild devastated areas. In such ways, today’s United Nations would appear very strange to the 1945 founders. Most of the UN budget now goes to economic and humanitarian programmes.
As noted above, “democracy” is not mentioned in the UN Charter. The United Nations endorses and assists in installing this principle in countries moving toward it and even gives on-site advice as to how to conduct elections. There is movement towards the creation of a “democracy caucus” among Member States and a “democracy fund” to support the Organization’s democratizing efforts. How to ensure that commitment to democracy and human rights is a criterion for membership in the Security Council and the contemplated Human Rights Council are issues on the 2005 UN reform agenda.
This very limited sketch of the United Nations resiliency and adaptability over six decades does not refute claims that the Organization is ponderous, insufficiently transparent, victimized by patronage and impeded by canons of the State system that do not measure up to the demands of a highly technological, globalized society. It does, however, provide some insights into how it has been able to prove itself useful and meet the needs of changing circumstances.
The United Nations at sixty has existed three times long as the League of Nations did. It is a survivor. Its future depends most of all on the extent to which Member States are prepared to dedicate themselves to the purposes of the UN Charter. Given its trajectory, there is reason to expect the United Nations to become more democratic in the true sense of better representing the people who are its ultimate constituents.
“The Charter of the United Nations, which you have just signed, is a solid structure upon which we can build a better world. History will honor you for it. ...With this Charter, the world can begin to look forward to the time when all worthy human beings may be permitted to live decently as free people. ... If we fail to use it, we shall betray all those who have died so that we might
meet here in freedom and safety to create it. If we seek to
use it selfishly—for the advantage of any one nation or any
small group of nations—we shall be equally guilty of that betrayal.”
President Harry Truman of the United States
26 June 1945, on the signing of the UN Charter
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How the United Nations Was Born
Inter-Allied Declaration
Signed in London on 12 June 1941, the Inter-Allied Declaration—“to work together, with other free peoples, both in war and peace”—is a first step towards the establishment of the United Nations.
Atlantic Charter
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom on 14 August 1941 propose a set of principles for international collaboration in maintaining peace and security. The document, signed during a meeting “somewhere at sea” on the ship HMS Prince of Wales, is known as the Atlantic Charter.
Declaration by United Nations
On 1 January 1942, representatives of 26 Allied nations fighting against the Axis Powers meet in Washington, D.C. to pledge their support for the Atlantic Charter by signing the “Declaration by United Nations”. This document contained the first official use of the term “United Nations”, which was suggested by President Roosevelt.
Moscow and Teheran Conferences
In a declaration signed in Moscow on 30 October 1943, the Governments of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and China call for an early establishment of an international organization to maintain peace and security. That goal is reaffirmed at the meeting of leaders of the United States, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United Kingdom at Teheran, Iran on 1 December 1943.
Dumbarton Oaks Conference
First blueprint of the United Nations is prepared at a conference at a mansion known as Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. During two phases of meetings, which ran from 21 September to 7 October 1944, the United States, the United Kingdom, the USSR and China agree on the aims, structure and functioning of a world organization.
Yalta Conference
On 11 February 1945, following meetings at Yalta, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Joseph Stalin of the USSR declare their resolve to establish “a general international organization to maintain peace and security”.
San Francisco Conference
On 25 April 1945, delegates of 50 nations meet in San Francisco for the UN Conference on International Organization and draw up the 111-article Charter, which is adopted unanimously on 25 June 1945 in the San Francisco Opera House and signed the next day in the Veterans War Memorial Building.
United Nations
United Nations officially comes into existence on 24 October 1945 when its Charter is ratified by the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of other signatories.
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Lawrence S. Finkelstein is a retired professor of political science. He served in the United States Department of State (1944-1946) and the United Nations (1946-1949), attending major meetings and conferences where the United Nations was imagined, conceived and created. He also worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and in the United States Department of Defense, as well as at Harvard University and Northern Illinois University. |
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