Group B S02W07 - the U.N.

The U.N. has failed and needs replacing - discuss.

I think that the U.N have never done anything good in the first place. I mean, in my own opinion, the United nations have only work for the capitalism and took some others measures to keep up a good face. If peace, security and economics relationships have been maintained since 1945 it's not thanks to them, it's a side effect of the trauma that everyone lived during the WW2.
That's why today, since this trauma have lowered, human nature rise once more: shootings, terrorism, climate troubles, wars, sexual harassment ... In my own opinion, the U.N. have always ever been a smoke screen and they ain't the reason why our world was better to live in. Since now everyone is looking to have the biggest one, the U.N, like in the first place, have no reason to exist. Perhaps, when something really big will come up like a WW, mankind will remember that it's better to live together than quarrel.

What i really mean to say is that, having a negotiator is meaningless if no one want to discuss and are looking to screw the others. That's why the U.N failed because no one follow the rules anymore.

"The United Nations has become the foremost forum to address issues that transcend national boundaries and cannot be resolved by any one country acting alone."

Just by looking at this organizasional chart, you can see what king of issues the UN are addressed with: www.un.org/fr/aboutun/structure/pdf/UN%20System%20Chart_FR.pdf  (the environment : climate change and water, hunger, woman and child condition, international trade, crime and justice.....).

UN nations have failed because PLENTY of issues merged as the Wolrd developped. The situation being more complex, states sometimes struggle to agree.  Though, you can have a larger vision of what the UN does: http://www.un.org/fr/infographics/ or https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/15/united-nations-what-has-it-ever-done-for-you-interactive

The problem is that it needs to be more operational  (as the program Deliver as one tried but failed to do) and also the "standard operating procedures" (by Clark, who chairs the UN Development Group).

There is a discimination problem inside the UN.
India is a leading member of the G77. Its ambassador to the UN, Asoke Kumar Mukerji, said the rich countries took the high-level jobs in the name of efficiency. [...]The US gets Unicef and the World Food Programme. China runs the Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Russia is in charge of crime.
[...] “There are massive fights,” said one official who described the US, EU, Japan and Australia on the side of cutting budgets, inefficiency and jobs while the G77 was painted as wanting more spending and more jobs for their nations.[...] The stronger member states have such an interest in not having a strong secretary general. They want a secretary general they are able to influence, lobby.” [...] US, Britain and France in particular want to modernise the UN
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/07/what-has-the-un-achieved-united-nations

The UN have a YouTube channel, to broadcast a LIVE feed of documentaries about issues of the world. But there is one other way of modernizing the UN. The Virtual reality. Its goal is to make Government leaders donate more money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=W7sklqpGlUY


Here, I showed what's wrong in the UN, what their projects and missions are, positive initiatives in the effort of gathering financial help. I hope it helped you to see more what you don't have time to look at.
In the end, I still don't see why the UN failed. I just see that times are difficult for them.

Personally, I agree with Matthieu. Do we really need a replacement for UN? I don't have a lot of knowledge about UN, but it seems to me they keep a very beautiful (and expensive) speach about peace and equality but in the end they don't have enough power to really change stuff.

We always see on the news like "UN condemns the war in Iraq" or "UN asks North Corea to stop the development of nuclear weapons", but in the end nobody cares, they do what they want. So, what is the point in having an international organization if they don't have power to act? If not even the most powerful and influential representatives from all over the world achieve to end wars, why do we still care about UN?

For me, we are still very far from having an efficient wordwide council that works in fact. In the end, each country are thinking about their interests first, and money always talks louder than anything else in a capitalist world. Because the first thing they should do to stop war is stop selling guns to countries in conflict.

What are the countries that more export guns in the word?
1. USA
2. Russia
3. China
4. Germany
5. France

And who are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council?
1. USA
2. Russia
3. China
4. France
5. UK

So, for me, it's just a bunch of hypocrites.

In addition to what Mayra said : the countries who are "permanent members" are also the countries with the very most nuclear nukes in the world... Fun! They keep putting their veto on denuclearisation of the world.

U.N are here to assure a safe world, in theory. Why do they need to keep a sufficient amount of weapons to destroy everything?

Death merchants.

In fact, the development of weapons is attributed to the difference of human's survival concept, a country is also formed in this way. People wants to get the most important collective interests bu means of establishing a country and also elect their spokesgovernment. So the difference of the concept leads to the conflict of interests between the country, so we can see  the struggle for hegemony between America and the Soviet Union. And finally the Soviet had broke out and accepted the American way-a democratic regime. But for gaining the national interests, it should firstly defend their proper, existing interests. So that is the reason why the weapons are very fastly developing. Unless in this world it doesn't exist the concept of country and we do have a community with shared future for humanity, who can also represent all humain's interests, the weapons will not exist, but impossible.
So return to the UN, in fact in my opinion UN is like democratic and tyranic country where their citizens are all kind of big or small countries. The five initiators of the UN can have the eternal place in the aspect of making decisions, and the small country select stand in between the 5 countries. We can't expect the UN can do something,every countries do the things what are favorable to their side. But that is the sense of etalishing a country, paradoxical and make no sense.

To be honest I'm not enough aware of this subject to be able to give you an interesting opinion about it and at this point, I unfortunately think it is a bit late to learn more about it haha!

I just personally think that the UN were created on a beautiful purpose which is nearly impossible to achieve because of the financial interests of each great powerful country in this world, which is why I find it hard to blame them for failing.

Sorry for this very unuseful opinion...

Maybe we could try to find a topic everyone of us can discuss about next week?