Question

what is the United Nations?

Answer 1

International organization formed in 1945 to promote peace and end conflicts. Representatives of 50 different nations. Members promised to work together to find peaceful solutions to international problems.

Answer 2

An organization of nations founded at the end of the Second World War to replace the inneffectual Leage of Nations, itself founded at the end of the First World War. Both organizations were conceived with the idea that an organization of nations could somehow prevent world war.

The principal difference between the League and the UN is the presence of the UN Security Council, which has a great deal of power -- it can, for example, in principle order armed intervention, without the permission of the General Assembly. While any nation admitted to the UN is part of the General Assembly, and has a vote there, membership in the Security Council is severely restricted. There are five permanent members: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and ten rotating members (currently Azerbaijan, Colombia, Germany, Guatemala, India, Morocco, Pakistan, Portugal, South Africa and Togo). A remarkable distinction of the permanent members is that each has an un-overridable veto over any action of the Security Council, and, therefore, over any practical action the UN might take. The presence of this strong concentration of power in the hands of a few nations is supposed to make the UN more effective than the League ever was. And, in fact, the UN has intervened military quite a number of time in its existence, most famously during the invasion of South Korea by North Korea in 1950. More recently, the missions to stop the Serbian invasion of Kosovo in the 1990s, and eject the Iraqi troops of Saddam Hussein from occupation of Kuwait in 1990 were UN-sanctioned interventions. The UN has no troops of its own, so in every case it must call upon members states to provide any necessary troops. Sometimes, in small operations, those troops are integrated into a multinational force that wears the UN uniform, but for large operations the troops are normally commanded by and appear int the uniform of the member state.

The UN also has a number of agencies that are supposed to promote world development, including UNESCO and UNICEF, that assist in disasters, such as the UNHCR, that monitor, report on, and carry out transnational campaigns regarding public health, like the WHO, and that promote international financial assistance, like the IMF. Some of these have considerable independence and only nominally report to the General Assembly or Security Council.

There is also an international criminal court, and from time to time people have actually been prosecuted there for crimes against humanity, e.g. Slobodan Milsoevic.

The UN gets its money by assessing its member states more or less according to their "ability to pay" as determined by the UN itself. So, for example, the United States is routinely assessed about 40% of the entire UN's budget.

Although a few of the UN's agencies garner general respect, e.g. UNICEF, and sometimes the IMF and WHO, and its defenders will suggest it is better than any known alternative, the UN itself is widely derided as an inept, ineffectual, wasteful and corrupt organization. It has never been very popular in the United States, except among schoolteachers and students, and at various times the United States has withheld its donations, and criticized or ignored its resolutions.

Whatever its value, it's fair to say as a world government, or even partial world government, the UN is a flop. Countries rarely or never take their disputes to the UN for resolution, and its solutions to problems are rarely implemented. It was much more popular in the 60s and 70s, when hope was held out for it as an international tribunal. Whether its failure means world government is impossible, or must just be tried with some other structure, is a question of much interest.