The UN in Freefall: Collapse or Resurgence? (Commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the UN Charter)

The United Nations, established as the culmination of global efforts to create a sustainable system for maintaining international peace and security, approaches its 80th anniversary with a rich record of both successes and failures in fulfilling its core mission. Forged from the universal desire for peace following the tragedies of the Second World War, the system has, from its inception, operated amid ongoing international conflicts: during the Cold War, the Western bloc’s aspirations for a unipolar world in the early post-Soviet era, and today’s struggle by new centres of power to secure their place in a multipolar world. Over these 80 years, the UN Charter has been amended only three times, and solely to increase the number of member states represented in certain bodies. All other aspects of applying the Charter, amid sweeping changes in human life, technology, economics, and international relations, have been shaped through state practice, which continues to reveal the depth of its founding principles. At the same time, this approach to the Charter’s evolution remains vulnerable to abuse and to attempts by some Western states to erode those principles, monopolize the system, or, where it stands in the way of their geopolitical ambitions, paralyze it. Eighty years of interpreting and applying the UN Charter calls for a conceptual reassessment: for defining clear boundaries between the objective process of the Charter’s development as a living instrument and subjective encroachments on its foundations across a broad range of issues. These include the Security Council’s mandate to maintain peace and security, the search for new purposes for the UN General Assembly, strengthening the International Court of Justice as a universal forum for settling international disputes, adapting UN institutions to the realities of a multipolar world, defining the role of non-state actors in developing the international legal order, and deepening cooperation between the UN and regional organizations. Will UN member states stay in control of this complex system? And what trajectory will its next ascent follow?