From seeds to system: the United Nations Charter.

• Author: Finkelstein, Lawrence S.
• Position: ESSAY

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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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...