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May 8, 2003 There’s a lot of that these days about the “relevance” of the United Nations. It might have been relevant during the Cold War, some people say, but certainly it’s not any more. This is the argument the Bush Administration seems to be advancing, anyway. The U.N. is nothing more than a Cold War dinosaur, so why bother with it? Most of this discussion started with the conflict regarding Iraq that played out in the Security Council during the past year . These arguments set a dangerous precedent and stem largely from erroneous views of what the United Nations is and does. First, let’s set some of these misconceptions straight. The United Nations is not a single organization. It is a set of organization, all of which are interconnected and at the service of the international community. Secondly, the UN isn’t even primarily a set of organizations. Rather, it is a forum for international discussion and cooperation. It was not intended to be some sort of overarching one world government (and indeed, it isn’t), but a set of soverign governments that can come together and discuss in ways that they could not before. Before the Second World War, the normal way that countries interacted was through bilateral, or country to country meetings. This had several drawbacks. Arraingements, meetings and treaties were made in secret, and half the time not even the countries that were parties to the treaties knew they were. Secondly, this system encouraged alliances based on the personal interests of the ruler and created multiple points of power throughout the world. The UN, with its central location, brings all the nation states of the world together to discuss. Technically it only brings together the states that are members of the UN, but, as of this writing, the only country that is not a member state is the Vatican, and that is by choice. They do have permanent obsever status, which means they can show up to international discussions and participate in the debate, but they just can’t vote. Bringing all the governments together in one place, whether they lioke each other or not, has at least one advantage: they all have a means of communicating with each other, at least unofficially. For example, two countries without formal relations, like the U.S. and Iraq, can hear each others views on the floor of the General Assembly. Facillitation of communication prevents inadvertant hostillities. When most people hear about the UN, they immediately associate it with either the General Assembly or the Security Council. And these are important parts of the internation system known as the United Nations; the General Assembly provides a forum for international discussion, while the Security Council provides legally binding rules for state to state relationships. However, the General Assembly and the Security Council are only small parts of the U.N. Other organizations include UNICEF, which prevents health disasters among childred worldwide, and the World Food Program (WFP), which delivers food to starving people in poor or war torn countries like South Africa, Ethiopia and Iraq. But perhaps the most poingant example of Unied States cooperation with the United Nations has happened in the last few weeks. I’m referring to the cooperation of the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC), with the World Health Organization, an organ of the United Nations, throughout the SARS epidemic. Severe Accute Respiratory Syndrome was identified by the World Health Organization after it started in China a few weeks ago. Because of China’s cover-up of this disease, it spread rapidly to Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong and even Canada, largely because public Health officials in these countries had little to no information on the existence of the disease or ways to combat it. The CDC, however, has beenin constant contact with the WHO throughout the epidemic, and because of this relationship, has been able to disseninate information about SARS to health care providers and to the public, to facillitate identification of SARS cases in New York City, and to come up with ways to stop the spread of the disease around the country. The CDC has a short section on SARS on its website, but still points people to the WHO website for the majority of the available information. Put another way, only the cooperation of a United States government entity (the CDC) with the United Nations (speifically, the WHO) has aved the this country from a public health disaster. if the governemnt did not communicate with and follow the cues of the UN in this instance, many more Americans would have contraced SARS and died of it before it was even recognized. So, it seems the pronouncements of the irrelevancy and the death of the United Nations by the Bush Administration and the American media are contradictory and premature. Perhaps changes must be made in the structure of the General Assembly or the Security Council. It would be disasterous, however, to abolish them, because they provide the only legal authorization for other UN organizations like the WHO. My conclusion is that while we (the US) have had problems with parts of the UN, we are deeply indebted to other parts of it. So, let’s hear it for the U.N. David Aurisano is a graduate student at the University of Houston. Email David: daurisano@hotmail.com ------------ Comment on this column in the forum. ------------ |
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