Gwynne Dyer: World's guard against anarchy

The great force on which we must rely is the hatred of the cruelty and waste of war which now exists. As soon as the war is over the process of oblivion sets in," Lord Robert Cecil wrote as World War I drew to an end.

"It is only, therefore, while the recollection of all we have been through is burning fresh that we can hope to overcome the inevitable opposition and establish a new and better organisation of the nations of the world."

Cecil was a member of Britain's Imperial War Cabinet and the organisation he hoped could prevent another such war was the League of Nations. It failed and we got World War II, which killed five times as many people.

By the end of that one, nuclear weapons were being dropped on cities, so the victors had no choice but to clone the League and try again. Sixty years ago the Charter of the United Nations was signed by 50 nations in San Francisco.

There was not a single idealist among those who signed the Charter. They were frightened people who had lived through the worst war in history and who feared an even worse one lay in wait.

They were so frightened they were even willing to give up the most important aspect of national sovereignty: the right to wage war against other countries. Six decades later, how is their organisation doing?

Two things cannot be denied: the UN has already survived three times longer than its ill-starred predecessor, and the great war it was meant to prevent has not happened.

In the various crises that might have ended with the superpowers sliding into a nuclear war - the Cuban crisis of 1962, the Middle East war of 1973, and so on - the United Nations Security Council was an essential forum for negotiations, and the charter provided a new kind of international law that the rivals could defer to without losing face when they wanted to back away from crisis.

So why is the United Nations held in disdain today? One reason is that Lord Robert Cecil was right: "the process of oblivion sets in" quickly, and later generations cannot remember why it was so supremely important to create an organisation to prevent further great-power wars.

Besides, the UN isn't too widely held in disdain. It gets a bad press in the United States, but that is mainly because it acts as a brake on the untrammelled exercise of American military power.

It is still quite popular in most of the world, although it continues to annoy nationalists in all the great powers, and at the other extreme, it frustrates and infuriates the idealists who want it to be about justice and democracy and even brotherly love.

It is not. As Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican senator and ambassador to the United Nations, said in 1955: "This organisation is created to keep you from going to Hell. It isn't created to take you to Heaven."

For all the fine words of the Charter, the UN is still mainly about preventing another major war between the great powers (and as many other wars as possible).

Does the United Nations need to be reformed? Certainly. It has acquired some bad habits, and its structures have not kept up with the realities of a rapidly changing world.

The main focus of reformers is on the Security Council, whose permanent, veto-wielding members are still the five victorious great powers of 1945. Three-quarters of the countries that now comprise the UN were not even independent then, so clearly some adjustment is overdue.

The UN is an attempt to change the way international politics works, because the only alternative was to accept perpetual war, and by 1945 that was no longer an acceptable option. But not even the optimists imagined it could succeed in less than a century or so.

Sixty years on, it may not yet be even halfway to its goal. No need to despair. As its most influential secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, said: "None of us are ever going to see the world order we dream of appear in our lifetime. Nevertheless, the effort to build that order is the difference between anarchy and a tolerable degree of chaos."

* The 60th anniversary of the United nations was celebrated this weekend. In Friday's Herald Malcolm Templeton looked at the organisation from a New Zealand perspective. Gwynne Dyer sees it from the perspective of a commentator on international affairs.