Reforming the United Nations: Prospects and Limitations

Abstract

Created by 51 countries in 1945, the United Nations (UN) needs a radical reform. The Heads of State and Government committed 191 countries, through the 2005 World Summit Outcome (Appendix), to continue the efforts to reform the UN to make it more efficient, effective and relevant. Many substantive aspects of the document still need further elaboration and multilateral negotiations.

The document reaffirms fundamental values and contains clear commitments on steps needed to reach, by 2015, the development goals agreed upon at the Millennium Summit in September 2000. It is aimed at strengthening the UN’s capacity for peacekeeping, peacemaking and peace-building, including a detailed project for a new peace-building commission. It contains recommendations to establish a Human Rights Council.

A more dynamic reform process is needed. It has to be tailored to respond effectively to the most ominous threats to international peace and security. If “effective multilateralism” is to be achieved, all States have to go beyond what is immediately significant and urgent to each of them at a strictly national level and help bring about a new multilateral approach for a new agenda on substantive and institutional issues.

Member States cannot establish a new world policy agenda without an effective UN system adapted to the new realities of a changing human society at planetary level.

In times when there are voices calling into question the relevance and even the utility of the world organization and when the UN Secretariat has to cope with a succession of recent mismanagement revelations, additional efforts are necessary to visibly ensure the UN’s efficiency and credibility. The Security Council should be enlarged and adapted to the new realities and increasing demands. But how? The divergences of views are still great.

Whatever the qualifications given to the 2005 World Summit Outcome, the UN reform encouraged by it is still a work in progress. It conveys a mandate for change, but without offering practical consensus solutions. Words and promises are insufficient. They must be followed by convincing action able to give tangibility to existing commitments and to bring the world organization’s founding ideals to life.