The United Nations (UN) is an international organization whose stated aims are

facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic

development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace. The
UN was founded in 1945 after World War II to replace the League of Nations, to stop
wars between countries, and to provide a platform for dialogue. It contains multiple
subsidiary organizations to carry out its missions. The name "United Nations",
coined by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Activities
The United Nations has achieved considerable prominence in the social arena,
fostering human rights, economic development, decolonization, health and
education, for example, and interesting itself in refugees and trade. The idea of
world peace is, in itself, a relatively recent idea. Not so long ago, all over the world,
and in Europe in particular, every generation had had "its" war. A certain fatalism
towards war was rooted in our mentalities. War was almost considered as inevitable
and peace was only a vague utopian dream. The first 20th century peace
movements were born between the two wars, that is in the twenties and thirties,
and gave rise to the League of Nations. Unfortunately, the League failed in its quest
because the member States had not succeeded in endowing the League with the
instruments needed to establish peace, such as our modern-day peacekeepers. The
rise in the nationalist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries that provoked the
two world wars played, according to some, a major role in the idea of creating the
conditions for world peace. World War I took the lives of more than 9 million people,
killing between 20% to 25% of the male population of France and Germany. As for
World War II, 55 million people died, including 6 million Jews in the Nazi
concentration camps.
The Role of the United Nations in the Modern World
Publication date: 2003-02-10
All wars eventually lead to peace - to sobering up of belligerent rhetorics and to
realization that prevention is better than reconstruction.

It is such post-war sobering up that lead to the establishment of the League of

Nations after World War I, and of it's successor the United Nations Organization after
World War II.

The purpose of these organizations was prevention of wars.

As we know the League of Nations had failed in that task. And the UN is now passing
a test, of whether it can be an effective instrument of peace.

So far, the UN has been unable to prevent regional wars, which have been going on
all the time up to the present day, but there was no World War III.

Was this due to the UN? Or was it due to the Cold War Balance of Power between
the two Power Blocks lead by the two rival super-powers?

The Balance of Power was certainly the material force behind the peace. But the UN
did play the role of a meeting place where the super-powers could talk to each other
when the things were getting too hot.

At one of such meetings a super-power leader had to take of his shoe and bang it on
the table to put his point across. But shoe-bangings were preferable to bombings and World War III has been averted.

But can the UN still prevent a global war now, when the military Balance of Power is
no longer there?

The Bush administration are seeking to formulate new principles for world
government, which will be effectively performed by the United States, as the world's
most powerful nation. These principles are stated in the The National Security
Strategy of the United States of America Report (September 2002).
This note concentrates on the othr three main issues we looked at over the
weekend widening the scope of the UN; globalisation/polarisation and institutional
issues. Even so it can scarcely reflect the richness and diversity of the points of
view expressed which ranged from the existential to the institutional.
We asked ourselves what the UN could do about those problems given that its core
budget was modest (roughly equivalent, we heard, to that of a medium sized US
city) and that it relied heavily on intergovernmental cooperation, which it could
advise and lead, but which it could not compel. The general conclusion was that the
UN was not itself the institution which could establish what the solutions to the
worlds economic problems should be. Nor was it the mechanism for the delivery of

those solutions even though, in its International Financial Institutions and its
development programmes, it could indicate priorities, as the Secretary General had
done in referring to the millions of people who now lived in absolute poverty. The
UN could, however, exercise great influence as a catalyst for development and
poverty alleviation..