Marianne BeisheimSenior associate in the Global Issues Division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP)
The answer depends on the (assigned) purpose. Former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld’s words “The United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell,” are still valid.
Without a doubt, the UN suffers from geopolitical tensions, and numerous member states with competing interests challenge the international order. It is telling that the President of the General Assembly Dennis Francis chose the theme of the seventy-eighth session to be “Rebuilding trust and reigniting global solidarity.”
Yet, the UN can be a successful norm-setter—if member states allow it—with the UN system supporting follow-up and implementation. Take the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals, which now serve as a kind of glue for the international community. The UN has convening power, bringing together most leaders. It has a voice through its secretary-general, and it is increasingly giving a voice to non-state actors, which is important given the shrinking space for civil society. The 2024 Summit of the Future will be a litmus test of whether member states can agree to make the UN a place that saves us from future threats and existential polycrisis. As Secretary-General António Guterres put it, “It’s reform or rupture.”
Louis CharbonneauUnited Nations director at Human Rights Watch
When people ask whether the UN is relevant today, they usually have in mind the UN Security Council. It is definitely one of the most dysfunctional parts of the UN, largely due to the widening ideological gulf between the five veto-wielding permanent members (P5)—usually pitting Russia and China on one side and the United States, UK, and France on the other. Time and again, the Security Council has failed to take any action on Ukraine, Israel, Sudan, and countless other crises because one or more P5 members blocks things.
But let’s not forget the UN aid programs aimed at feeding hungry people or vaccinating children. Those who rely on UN aid to survive don’t think it’s irrelevant.
That is not to say the UN is a model of efficiency. UN aid programs save lives but are often slow, bureaucratic, and occasionally marred by cowardice and/or mismanagement. In terms of human rights, the UN leadership is too often afraid to call out big powers. It tends to have a blind spot when it comes to calling out China’s abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. China represents an existential threat to the UN’s human rights architecture. The question is whether the UN leadership will confront that threat head on or continue to bury its many heads in the sand.
Richard GowanUN director at the International Crisis Group, New York
Almost everyone is unhappy with the state of the UN, but their reasons for being unhappy with it vary. Whereas Europeans would say the organization’s main failing is its inability to constrain Russia, observers in the developing world have different complaints.
For the countries of the so-called Global South, rich countries’ failure to invest in fulfilling the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the top worry. As the economic shocks associated with COVID-19 and Russia’s war on Ukraine have left poorer states floundering, there has been a growing sense that Western and non-Western UN members are drifting inexorably apart.
At this week’s high-level General Assembly, U.S. President Joe Biden and other Western leaders were clearly out to narrow this divide. Biden notably only raised Ukraine two-thirds of the way through his speech to the assembly. He talked a lot about economic solidarity and climate change instead.
This was smart. The UN is a venue where the United States and EU can burnish their relations with small and middle-sized countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. China is trying to solidify its influence over these countries, including in UN forums. Western powers can work through multilateral diplomacy to protect an open, liberal international system.
Shada IslamManaging director of the New Horizons project
The UN is in desperate need of a major root and branch overhaul. The system is old and hopelessly out of date. It harks back to a long-gone era when a few countries, led by the United States and some European states, ran the show. It does not reflect the complex realities of today’s multipolar world.
Since efforts at reform aren’t getting anywhere, we are stuck with a creaky organization which even its Secretary-General Antonio Guterres acknowledges is racked by divisions—and not just over Russia’s war in Ukraine. Moscow’s aggression has clearly made a mockery of the UN Security Council as the world’s moral policeman. No surprises then that so many world leaders are not attending the current General Assembly session in New York.
Still, we can use the UN for a few things: For instance, it should step up the pressure on states to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Progress has been slow so far, making it imperative that the UN system puts time, energy, and money to pressure governments in the north and the south to keep the SDG commitments that they made in 2015. It is also imperative that the UN chief has the moral courage to call out all governments, regardless of their geopolitical clout, whenever they are in violation of human rights, including the rights of minorities and women. Following a policy of selective outrage over rights abuse undermines the UN’s authority even further.
Denis MacShaneFormer UK Minister for Europe
Yes. Two efforts were made in the twentieth century to create a system of partial global governance. The first was the League of Nations. It was rendered useless by U.S. isolationism after 1920. Its key agency, the International Labour Organisation, gave workers and trade unions a role in world governance that came into its own after 1945 as imperialist capitalism had to accept some limits on its predatory anti-societal greed.
The second, the United Nations, is a self-limiting supranational agent of international governance. It could not stop war, famine, but when opposing nations needed an off-ramp to back away from conflict the UN was there with military presence as well as skilled bridge-building negotiators.
It is where the Global South has a forum; the United States, Russia, now China can be put on the naughty chair; secular democratic rule can assert itself over faith or ideological autocracies; and bad practices from torture to child sexual abuse exposed and sometimes sanctioned. The climate emergency needs a UN forum—not bilateral, or multilateral talkfests of do-nothing national leaders. Key UN agencies like the WHO, UNHCR, OHCHR do vital work.
It’s a cliché, but if the UN did not exist, it would have to be invented if the world is to make any progress.
Mary C. MurphySenior lecturer in politics at University College Cork
In his address to the seventy-eighth UN General Assembly, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres highlighted the profound difficulties facing the contemporary world and criticized the inability of the UN to tackle global challenges. He suggested that at this moment in time: “It’s reform or rupture. The world has changed. Our institutions have not.”
Guterres is right—the institutional structures which anchor global cooperation are not fit for purpose. The UN Security Council has been woefully weak in confronting the war in Ukraine and other conflicts around the world. Its membership, functions, and powers need to be reset and reimagined. The UN’s ability to deal with the climate change crisis is often commendable, but ultimately hamstrung by a requirement for universal consensus. Its financial clout and ability to sustain humanitarian support for the Global South are undermined by late and unpredictable payments.
Institutional reform aimed at addressing these failings is exceptionally difficult and critically, it requires high-level political leadership. Strong political support for a reform agenda—particularly among UN Security Council members—is glaringly absent. However, without such a commitment, the UN’s ability to be a force for peace and progress is undermined and the multilateral principles which sustain cooperation are weakened.
The choice between reforming and rupturing is real—the former may seem unlikely, but the latter is unthinkable.
Stewart PatrickSenior fellow and director of the Global Order and Institutions Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The United Nations is no longer fit for purpose. But the primary cause of its current debility lies less in its institutional shortcomings than in the refusal of important UN member states—not least Russia—to respect the principles of the UN Charter and, more generally, to temper their geopolitical rivalries and insistence on complete freedom of action, so that they can cooperate in the realization of shared global interests from nuclear proliferation to climate action to pandemic preparedness.
The UN’s most important institutional flaw is the outdated composition of the Security Council, which poses an existential threat to the long-term credibility and legitimacy of the world’s premier organ for international peace and security.
It is past time for the UNSC to expand its permanent membership to include Japan, Germany, and India, as well as influential countries from Africa and Latin America. Such a change would be no silver bullet, of course, since it could complicate decisionmaking on the Council. More fundamentally, it would not alter a structural reality inherent in the Charter and evident in the war in Ukraine: Each of the world’s great powers will always insist on the right to veto enforcement action under Chapter 7 that it deems as contrary own vital interests.
Tommy SteinerPolicy director at the Sino-Israel Global Network and Academic Leadership (SIGNAL)
That would depend on how one defines “purpose.” From a Chinese perspective, the UN is perfectly fit for the purpose of advancing its agenda to reshape the world order in a way that would suit its interests. Over the past decade, the UN has become one of the primary arenas of Chinese diplomacy and enmeshed with its bid to lead the so-called Global South as a counterweight to the United States and its Western allies.
China seeks to legitimize its principal global leadership by commanding a majority of UN member states; if you wish, the diplomatic version of the Law of Large Numbers. Chinese diplomats use UN fora to advance Chinese messaging—be it the definition of democracy or “indivisible security,” which Russia used as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Chinese officials and diplomats hold senior positions in the UN and across its specialized agencies.
The influential position of the UN deputy security-general for economic and social affairs has become a traditional China-held post. This has allowed Beijing to simply merge its aid program with the UN under the aegis of its Global Development Initiative (GDI)—with 60 countries represented at the ministerial meeting of the Friends of GDI at the margins of the UN General Assembly last year. What more could you ask for?
Ben TonraProfessor of international relations at University College Dublin
If that purpose is still defined as maintaining “international peace and security” and taking “effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression,” then manifestly the organization is failing—and failing spectacularly.
The fact that Security Council members themselves constitute an active threat to peace and security only makes that failure all the more egregious. It also underlines the urgent need for profound institutional reform—most especially in the representation and rights of Security Council members. UN reform however, at least in the practical sense, has been a non-starter to date. It is difficult to conceive of any scenario on the near horizon where such reform can take place.
On the other side of the balance sheet, the UN’s contemporary record in developing friendly relations among nations, promoting international cooperation, and respecting human rights and fundamental freedoms is at least mixed—even if arguably deteriorating as UN members fight rearguard actions in defense of existing agreements, institutions, and language.
At the same time, the UN is the only game in town. The ghosts of the League of Nations walk in New York.
Sinan ÜlgenSenior fellow at Carnegie Europe
As a post-World War II construct, the UN reflects the world order that has emerged after 1945. Despite several well-meaning attempts over the years, it has not sufficiently reformed itself to change with the times. And times have changed. Geopolitical shifts have empowered nations that were not even on the political map when the UN was created. Today it is really difficult to champion the legitimacy of a global system where the veto right remains in the hands of the five nations that happened to be on the winning side of a global conflict almost eighty years ago.
And yet humanity needs the UN. It is one of the things that had it not been there, it would need to be invented.
So, the real question is how to ensure not only the legitimacy but also the effectiveness of this institution? There are several aspects to UN reform but undoubtedly the most critical one relates to the Security Council where new rules will need to be designed to blur the stark contrast between permanent members and the rest of the world. The permanent members may want to reconcile with the thought that this anachronism needs to end very soon.
Pierre VimontSenior fellow at Carnegie Europe
One should not be too hard on the United Nations. Its perceived weakness only mirrors the state of the international playground. Nothing new here: From early on, the UN stumbled on the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and was mostly powerless for the whole of the Cold War. Today, the Security Council faces the same deadlock with the two main global powers, the United States and China, confronting each other for world pre-eminence. Power politics remains the organization’s fault line.
However, it would be foolish to entirely dismiss the UN for this inherent shortcoming. As flagging as the world order may be, the UN retains its legitimacy as the sole guardian of the universal principles embodied in its Charter. No nation disputes—at least overtly—those principles nor has come up with an alternative. If the Global South countries call for more representation in the UN system, they do not contest its relevance when striving for some consensus on climate change, sustainable development goals, and new financial assistance.
In the end, the challenge for the UN is one of efficiency. This calls for more trust and genuine solidarity among all its members. This is what today’s global powers confrontation cannot give.
