Global Policies and the United Nations System: A Current Assessment

Peacekeeping policies aimed at preventing or halting armed conflict and peace building aimed at eliminating the causes of war are both purported functions of the United Nations Organization and specialized agencies. UN peacekeeping efforts have been increasingly successful, largely because of external factors - most notably the re-establishment of consensus among permanent members of the Security Council regarding the value of the United Nations for maintaining peace. Yet there exists little if any basis upon which to formulate a comprehensive and co-ordinated strategy to address the causes of armed conflict. Significant impediments to peace building include a lack of consensus on the very nature of the problems of development and their remedies, an absence of effective leadership, and various structural inadequacies. The United Nations functions effectively both to make and to enforce global policies when the intergovernmental political climate allows, but most UN agencies are not well equipped structurally or procedurally to deal with situations that are more than traditionally intergovernmental in their structure and dynamics. Finally, just as traditional intergovernmentalism via the UN may not ultimately produce an effective response to problems of social and economic underdevelopment, neither may globalism be an ultimate formula. Global policy-making for peace building requires interaction with and access to local and national participants, resources and institutional mechanisms, private as well as public. Until and unless the fundamental assumptions upon which the UN system is based are greatly altered, global policies that emanate from UN agencies to deal with underdevelopment and other major threats to long-term world peace are not likely to be very effective.