20 - The United Nations

Summary

It would be ridiculous if the first era of planetary interdependence were to find the world without a unitary framework of international relations. With all its imperfections, the United Nations is still the main incarnation of the global spirit. It alone seeks to present a vision of humankind in its organic unity. At no other time have so many people crossed frontiers and come into contact with people of other faiths and nationalities; the new accessibility is steadily eroding parochialism. In light of these slow but deep currents of human evolution, the idea of an international organization playing an assertive role in the pacification of this turbulent world may have to bide its time, but it will never disappear from view. History and the future are on its side.

Abba Eban

Assessed in the context of a bifurcated world, international organizations (IOs), and especially the United Nations (UN), serve as bridges across the frontier that separates states in the state-centric world and NGOs and other actors in the multi-centric world. As implied in the analysis of states in chapter 18 and the discussion of NGOs in chapter 17, however, IOs are bridges under considerable tension, often wavering dangerously in the turbulent changes that pull at their foundations on opposite shores. Despite their shaky existence, however, the traffic across them is heavy and continuous, suggesting that they are major features of the emergent landscape of world politics.