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The United Nations organization

Another supranational political system that does not precisely fit any of the conventional classifications of such systems is the United Nations, a voluntary association of most of the world’s nation-states. Its membership had grown from an original 51 states to more than 190 by the early 21st century. (The government of the People’s Republic of China was admitted in place of the government of Taiwan in 1971.) The United Nations was founded in 1945 at a conference in San Francisco that was attended by representatives of all the countries that had declared war on Germany or Japan. The purposes of the organization are declared in its Charter to be the maintenance of international peace and security, the development of friendly relations among states, and international cooperation in solving the political, economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian problems of the world. Its organizational structure consists of a Security Council of five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and 10 nonpermanent members elected for two-year terms, a General Assembly, a secretary-general and a Secretariat, an Economic and Social Council, a Trusteeship Council, and the International Court of Justice. Attached to the United Nations are a number of specialized agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Labour Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the International Telecommunications Union, the Universal Postal Union, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Health Organization, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank).

Aside from the rather generally stated and decidedly elusive aims of the Charter, the member states of the United Nations cannot be said to have any common goal, and they have often failed to unify in the face of common external threats to security. There also has been difficulty in reaching and implementing decisions. Two different formulas are employed for voting in the two principal organs, the General Assembly and the Security Council. In the General Assembly a two-thirds majority decides on important matters, but, since the Assembly’s decisions are not binding and are merely recommendations, this qualified majority principle must be viewed as of little significance. Although, on the other hand, the decisions of the Security Council may be binding, a unanimous vote of all five of the permanent members joined by the votes of at least four of the nonpermanent members is required; whenever important questions of peace and security are at stake, it has rarely been possible to achieve agreement among the five great powers of the council. Although these difficulties might be fatal to the survival of many supranational organizations, they are not in fact totally debilitating for the United Nations. The United Nations continues to serve as a very important forum for international debate and negotiation, and its specialized agencies play an important role in what is sometimes referred to as “the functional approach to peace.”