Product Description

“With all its defects, with all the failures that we can check up against it, the UN still represents man’s best-organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield.”
–Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

The signing of the United Nations Charter in 1945 was an unprecedented development in the history of humankind. For the first time, the world’s most powerful sovereign nation states came together to create an autonomous organization designed to, in the Charter’s words, “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war [and] reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” Sixty years later, the UN still doggedly pursues that mandate, albeit not without difficulty and certainly not without criticism.

In The Parliament of Man, the distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy gives a thorough and timely history of the United Nations that explains the institution’s roots and functions while also casting an objective eye on the UN’s effectiveness as a body and on its prospects for success in meeting the challenges that lie ahead.

Building on expertise he gained in drafting official reports for the UN’s fiftieth anniversary on how to improve the organization’s performance, Kennedy makes sense of the many commissions and committees, and how its six main operating bodies–General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council (UNESCO), Trusteeship Council, Secretariat, and International Court–operate and interact. Citing examples from the UN’s history, he shows how the five permanent members of the Security Council–the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France–on numerous occasions overcame political antagonisms to spearhead military supervision of aid in humanitarian crises, and how lack of cooperation among the great powers has hamstrung such initiatives as the control of greenhouse gas emissions and exacerbated the deleterious effects of globalization on developing nations’ economies.

As a body, the UN emerges here for what it is: fallible, human-based, oftentimes dependent on the whims of powerful national governments or the foibles of individual senior UN administrators, but utterly indispensable. In The Parliament of Man, Kennedy ably proves that “it is difficult to imagine how much more riven and ruinous our world of six billion people would be if there had been no UN social, environmental, and cultural agendas–and no institutions to attempt to put them into practice on the ground.”

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #413364 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-20
• Released on: 2006-06-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Historian and political commentator Kennedy here turns his attention to the United Nations, an institution he believes, with reform and sustained effort, can make serious headway in addressing the kinds of problems he documented in Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. The core of the book-six broad and insightful mini-histories of the last sixty years of global security; peacekeeping efforts; economic development; environmental, social, and cultural advancement; human rights; and the creation of an international civil society-is grounded by a strong opening account of the historical factors and motivations shaping the U.N. charter. That document achieved the formidable task of keeping all of the Great Powers involved and is largely responsible for the U.N.'s indispensable role in shaping policy addressing Kennedy's six problem areas. However, Kennedy argues that international changes like widespread corruption in failing postcolonial states and a shifting balance of world power have created an urgent need for moderate structural changes and more radical conceptual ones if the organization is to remain effective and become more so-as, he believes, it must. Concluding with a brisk series of reform proposals that recognizes the limitations of superpower realpolitik, Kennedy offers an impressive, authoritative and sympathetic account of the U.N.'s past contributions and potential for the future.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Kennedy's history of the United Nations takes its title from "Locksley Hall," Tennyson's weirdly prescient vision of air war and world government. Like the poem, it oscillates between gloom and sentimentality. Kennedy, who wrote "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," proceeds methodically through the U.N.'s charter and its various branches, concentrating more on structures than on personalities—even figures like Ralph Bunche and Dag Hammarskjöld appear as little more than sketches. But, amid the morass of commissions and conferences, and failures like Rwanda, he manages to find something convincingly heroic. "The traditional, limp, liberal defense" of the U.N.—that it is a useful body in times of international crisis and has done good in areas such as Third World health—is, he writes "too weak a riposte" to the institution's critics. For Kennedy, the U.N.'s accomplishment is an "international civil society"—a development comparable to a second Enlightenment.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker - click here to subscribe.

From Booklist
The United Nations remains an object of hope, a source of legitimacy, and a frequent target of scorn and derision, especially in this country. The title of this book (taken from a Tennyson poem) suggests the optimism of the founders of the UN, who saw the best hope for avoiding the carnage of two world wars in an international organization to which nation-states would concede a certain degree of their national sovereignty. In this comprehensive history of the organization, Kennedy acknowledges that those hopes have largely proved ephemeral. Still, he remains a believer in both the necessity and potential effectiveness of the UN, and he suggests ways for improving the performance of the UN in the future. Unfortunately, Kennedy fails to come to grips with a fundamental problem, particularly troubling for skeptics: Why should people accept the legitimacy of an organization that condemns "Zionism as racism" while ignoring genocidal outrages elsewhere? Those who wish to understand the history and structure of the UN will find much value here, but Kennedy probably won't convert many doubters. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo: The UN 60 Years On
Today (February 7, 2008), 1,700 Blue helmets sit at the edge of the abyss in East Africa. The UN peacekeepers between Eritrea and Ethiopia are currently struggling without fuel and Eritrea will not allow it to refuel. It shows the powerlessness of the UN organization and its Utopian dreams of world peace. Yet, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has no plans to withdraw the troops because according to one UN official, "Abandoning our positions would sanctify a resumption of the conflict." Thus it shows the resolve of the organization and the good it does ameliorating conflict.

The UN is probably both the most hated and the most beloved international organization. It is both the image of why we cannot work together because of realist interests and why the world can do great things - such as the drive to eradicate small pox. In his Parliament of Man, Paul Kennedy describes the good, the bad and the ugly of the UN as it turns 60 years old. Kennedy also attempts to find a way forward for the world organization, which he feels if it didn't exist we'd have to invent it or parts of it.

The possible ugliness is palpable. To many critics in the conservative US, and elsewhere, the UN is seen as a dangerous attempt at world government. The various organs argue for human rights and for collective action on issues that would contradict the sovereignty of nations. The Security Council resolutions are binding and therefore must be observed by all within the organization. The Secretary General is often seen by such people as an aspirant world President. The questions of national sovereignty vis-a- vis such a universal organ is something appears to be in need of resolution constantly.

Even when there is not the question of national sovereignty at stake, the UN has its detractors. It seems ridiculous that Libya should head the Human Rights committee. Peacekeeping missions are often weak and only in position to be targets from either side of the dispute. Further, the dream of a Parliament of Man is lacking when the General Assembly cannot have binding resolutions. Some therefore, dismiss the UN's utopian dream as impossible.

Yet is it really the UN's dream? The actions of subgroups of the UN, such as UNICEF, is highly lauded. There is no one who does not see the good much of the UN does. The UNESCO group on defending cultural and natural "heritage sites" is something most people believe should happen so we can pass our history to our grandchildren. All too often there is, like in Eritrea, only a thin blue line between peace and chaos. Moreover, the UN offers a forum for debate and expression of views that can be found nowhere else.

Kennedy spells out this good, bad and ugly. He poses the case for reform, by analyzing both sides, the UN should do more people and the do less people. He finds that it should be tweaked while revolutionary change is impossible and perhaps unwarranted. Kennedy brings to this book the fantastic writing and clear analysis that he brought to his other works. All too often we dismiss international organizations and many attack their usefulness both from the right and the left; but what is that the computer tech tells Charlie in The West Wing: "if they're shooting at you, you know you're doing something right."

So-So
Kennedy's problems start with the title. It's great to quote from Tennyson, but the UN is hardly The Parliament of Man. It is a Parliament of governments, some of which legitimately represent their citizens because they are elected and some of which jail without trial, torture and/or kill their citizens. A second problem -- his numerous fiat-like assertions arbitrarily and falsely preempt debate. "However, to any reasonable person nowadays, it is outrageous that a 5 of the 191 sovereign states that make up the United Nations have special powers and privileges." He may be correct, probably is, but to seek to control the terms of debate with such a sweeping statement is the authorial equivalent of "have you stopped beating your wife?" Third, his views on the Security Council vs. General Assembly role in the organization are essentially black and white. The Security Council is generally lambasted as a cause of the UN's immobility and ineffectiveness. The General Assembly's half-century of weak performance pretty much gets off with the lightest of wrist slaps or is blamed on the limitations placed on it by the UN Charter. Whenever Kennedy is critical of something or someone inside or outside the UN, the person or institution is often modified by the word "conservative", again as if to pin most of the UN's problems on conservatives. Certainly there is some validity to that charge, but it's another example of an author pushing his views so hard that it undercuts what Parliament should and could have been, an even-handed contribution to the debate about how to begin reforming the UN so that the only game in town for global community action can be more effective in that action.

Kennedy could have done better!
There's probably no better qualified writer for a history of the UN and assessment of its prospects. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was an important and influential book, and the formation of the UN around the alliance of the victorious Allies really was the last collaboration among them. As the driver of the Great Powers School of geopolitical thinking, Kennedy was the right author for an analysis of the UN. Having a strong interest in the UN, I looked for a good history of analysis a few years back, and discovered the last one, by an LA Times reporter, was a decade old and out of print. It was wonderful to learn that a seminal historian would tackle the subject.

But at a time when most organizations are undergoing serious scrutiny for their roles in failing to capture the peace dividend, or serious lapses of intelligence and execution, in Kennedy's book the UN hardly gets any tough analysis. It is truly inexplicable that Srebrenica not get reviewed, or even Oil-for-Food Scandal.

The book not only overlooks what's important, it's boring. Yes, instead of looking at the organization from the ground up, he peers at it through a stack of paper. He wades through the verbiage of its self-definition, then bogs down in all its silly acronyms.

Here's what he should have written about: The UN is as DOA as the League of Nations unless it can rebalance membership in the Permanent Security Council to reflect the latent military clout of the current world. At heart, all the UN is an alliance between nations that were victorious 60-years ago. It will lose all purchase unless it can reflect probable military realities. Either it will change, or disappear. Hey, that would be a bad thing.

Reading the acknowledgements after the long boring platitudinous slog, I realized the problem. The UN commissioned Kennedy to write about the UN's situation. That explains how boring and polite this book is, purged of all drama. And that's duplicitous on Kennedy's part - especially if he got paid for his analysis, and then used the same material for a supposedly unbiased book.

Rewrite it with some teeth!