United Nations Reform: Looking Ahead After Fifty Years

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University, the
author of

Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom, and the
co-author of The Border at Sault Ste. Marie.

This collection of essays, written from a Canadian perspective,
commemorates the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. More political
science than history, the book includes commentaries by such well-known
personalities as Professor Michael Oliver, diplomat Geoffrey Pearson,
and Nobel Prize winner John C. Polanyi. The UN bureaucracy, peace and
security, human rights, the environment, and international law are among
the topics covered.

The writers make recommendations. Not all of them are compatible, but
most of them are worthy of consideration. The standing Peace Force
Arnold Simoni writes in support of is dismissed by William H. Barton as
“a sort of UN Foreign Legion.” Sharon A. Williams thinks that the
time has come for a permanent and effective mechanism for dealing with
crimes against humanity. She cannot, of course, guarantee that such a
mechanism would have deterred Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, or Bosnian Serb
leaders, but her argument is compelling. Hitler, she notes, mocked the
world’s failure to protect Armenians from Turkish atrocities; might
effective action on behalf of the Armenians not have discouraged Hitler
and the Nazis from their genocidal actions?

Reading UN bureaucrat Giandomenico Picco’s enumeration of UN
successes between 1987 and 1991 increases one’s appreciation of this
world body.