Critics of the United Nations have mainly focused on the organisation’s perceived inability to carry out the job it was established for: to effectively handle international conflicts and maintain world peace and security. However, the U.N. has also come under fire for its perceived bias, elitism, corruption, and for actively pursuing a globalist agenda. Let’s quickly consider each of these criticisms in turn.
In terms of inability to do its job, the U.N. has been accused of losing the sense of moral clarity and purpose it had upon its immediate formation after World War 2. In the decades after its establishment, particularly following the rapid growth of membership in the 1960s, the U.N. was accused of having become diluted with countries less in favour of freedom and democracy and more amenable to the requirements of dictatorships, leading the organisation as a whole to a position of moral relativism (a shifting perspective of what’s right and wrong) as opposed to taking decisive action in the face of aggression, genocide and terrorism.
Further, in relation to bias and elitism, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (the US, Russia, China, France & the UK) have often been described as an elite ‘nuclear weapons club’ of countries whose powers remain unchecked as they address only their own strategic interests and political motivations, leading to yet more moral relativism at the top of the organisation. Why, for example, was there a humanitarian intervention in oil-rich Kuwait in 1991 but not in resource-poor Rwanda in 1994? Additionally, the veto power of one permanent member of the Security Council to halt any action agreed to by the majority of other countries has been criticised for its in-built, undemocratic bias – a bias that has at times stopped the U.N. from carrying out its founding mandate of using preventative or enforcement action to maintain peace and security. Critics say the world has changed since the five permanent members ‘won’ World War 2 and that the constitution and role of the Security Council needs to change to reflect such shifts in the global power balance.
Whether through a dilution of moral purpose or through the Security Council’s permanent members acting in their own interests, the fact is that the U.N. has suffered a number of notable failures in terms of being an effective body: from failure to stop the 1971 Bangladesh atrocities, failure to stop the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre and, more recently, failure to intervene in the Darfur Crisis, through to administrative failures such as corruption allegations over the Iraq oil-for-food programme and scandals around peacekeepers sexually abusing those they have been on missions to protect, the perception of the U.N. as a universal force for good has been diminished. Perhaps the U.N.’s most notable failure of all has been its inability to find a solution to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of the U.N.’s earliest resolutions was to partition Palestine in 1947 but there remains no Palestinian state to this day, a source of enormous contention both within the region and beyond.
In terms of pursuing a ‘globalist agenda’, the U.N. has been criticised for attempting to create a ‘World Government’. Critics point out that in terms of democracy, the U.N. only represents the governments of its constituent nations, not the people of those nations, and that the Security Council holds way too much sway. Critics fear that, if left unchecked, the U.N. risks becoming an unrepresentative World Government that could supersede individual sovereign states. Whether that could ever happen in reality is highly unlikely but, while perception of the possibility still exists, suspicion around the organisation’s intentions will likely remain.
Okay, let’s dive into some of the detail. To learn more about one of the U.N’s most significant failures, the regional conflict that seems unsolvable, jump to Chapter 12: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
To learn more about the possibility of the U.N. or a similar organisation superseding all sovereign states, jump to Chapter 13: World Government
