4.1 Why Are International Organisations Needed?

The cartoonists of the world love to mock the United Nations. They draw it as a "talking shop" — a place where diplomats give long speeches while real wars rage outside. The 2006 Israel–Lebanon war was a famous example: the UN passed its ceasefire resolution only in August, and Israeli forces did not withdraw from the region until October, by which time large numbers of civilians had been killed and many residential areas destroyed. Cartoons of the period asked, with biting sarcasm, whether the UN was anything more than a place where countries could "bore each other with words rather than bore holes into each other on the battlefield".

And yet, in spite of the criticism, almost every nation in the world remains a member of the UN. That fact alone tells us something important. Whatever its weaknesses, the UN — and the wider family of international organisations^? it leads — is treated by humanity as indispensable. Why?

4.1.1 Three Core Reasons Nations Need International Organisations

The NCERT identifies three broad reasons why states create and sustain international organisations even though such organisations have no army or police of their own.

4.1.2 Examples of Problems That Need Common Action

Almost every major challenge of the twenty-first century crosses national borders. Climate change is the clearest example — sea levels rising because of greenhouse gases threaten cities from Mumbai to Miami, and no single country can stop it alone. Pandemic disease — from smallpox eradicated by the WHO in 1980 to COVID-19 in 2020 — depends on shared surveillance and shared vaccines. Global trade needs commonly agreed rules; otherwise every country sets its own tariffs and trade collapses. Terrorism moves easily across borders; intelligence sharing, sanctions and joint operations require permanent platforms. Refugees fleeing war need agencies like the UNHCR that can act in many countries at once. Each of these issues is a reason — by itself — to maintain a body like the United Nations.

4.2 The Failure of the League of Nations and the Birth of the UN

Humanity's first attempt to build an international organisation for peace was the League of Nations^?. The First World War (1914–18) — with its industrial-scale slaughter — convinced statesmen that the world had to invest in a permanent body to prevent future wars. The League was therefore born in 1920 with its headquarters in Geneva, and for a decade or so it had real successes — settling the Aaland Islands dispute between Finland and Sweden, supervising the Saar plebiscite, and reducing the slave trade. But it was always weak. The United States Senate refused to let America join. Japan walked out in 1933 after invading Manchuria. Italy walked out after invading Ethiopia in 1935. Germany under Hitler walked out as well. By the time war broke out in 1939, the League existed only on paper.

Despite some initial success, the League could not prevent the Second World War (1939–45). More people died and were wounded in this war than in any conflict in human history. As Allied victory came into view, the major powers therefore decided that a stronger, more universal organisation was needed.

4.2.1 The Atlantic Charter (1941) and the Declaration by United Nations (1942)

The first step came on a US warship in the Atlantic Ocean in August 1941, even before America had entered the war. The American President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill met secretly and agreed on the Atlantic Charter — a short statement of post-war principles including self-determination, free trade, and disarmament of aggressor states. In January 1942, twenty-six Allied nations fighting against the Axis Powers met in Washington, D.C., and signed the "Declaration by United Nations", formally endorsing the Atlantic Charter. The phrase United Nations — coined by Roosevelt — referred at first to the wartime alliance, not to a future organisation.

4.2.2 The Big Three at Tehran and Yalta (1943, 1945)

As the war turned in favour of the Allies, the leaders of the three main victorious powers — the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union — met first at Tehran in December 1943 and then at Yalta in February 1945. At Yalta, the "Big Three" (Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin) decided to organise a United Nations Conference on the proposed post-war world organisation. The conference would meet in San Francisco within months.

4.2.3 The San Francisco Conference and the UN Charter (April–June 1945)

From late April to early June 1945, fifty nations met at the San Francisco Conference^? to negotiate the founding document of the new world body — the UN Charter^?. On 26 June 1945, fifty of those countries signed the Charter; Poland — whose government had been disputed during the war — signed later, on 15 October 1945. With Poland added, the UN had 51 original founding members. The Charter set out the new organisation's purposes (preserving peace and security, promoting cooperation), its structure (six principal organs), and the rules under which all members would act.

The Charter came into force on 24 October 1945, after the required number of states had ratified it. From that day onwards, 24 October has been celebrated worldwide as UN Day. India joined a few days later, on 30 October 1945, even before its formal independence — a remarkable detail that reminds us how Indian leaders saw the UN as central to the new world even while they were still negotiating their own freedom.

4.3 What the UN Was Created to Do

The UN's purpose, as set out in the Charter, was to achieve what the League could not between the two world wars. There were three main objectives.

1. Prevent international conflict — to stop the kind of "escalating" disputes between states that had led twice in the twentieth century to world war.
2. Limit the extent of hostilities when war did break out — laws of war, humanitarian intervention, ceasefires.
3. Promote cooperation between states on economic and social development, since conflicts often arose from the lack of such development. The UN would bring countries together to improve the prospects of social and economic development all over the world.

The UN's headquarters was placed in New York City, on land donated by the Rockefeller family along the East River. Its other major centres of operation are in Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi. The UN's official emblem — a world map of the globe centred on the North Pole, surrounded by olive branches signifying peace — embodies the ideal of a planet seen as one shared home.

4.4 The Six Principal Organs of the United Nations

The Charter created six principal organs through which the UN does its work. Each organ has a specific role; together they form the architecture of the entire UN system.

4.4.1 The General Assembly (GA)

The General Assembly is the UN's main deliberative body. All 193 member states are represented in it, and each member has one vote — whether it is the United States or the smallest island state. The GA meets in regular session every year (September to December), debates global issues, recommends action on peace and security, approves the UN budget, and elects non-permanent members of the Security Council, members of ECOSOC, and the judges of the ICJ. It cannot pass binding laws on its members; its resolutions are recommendations. But the GA's symbolic and political weight is enormous — it is often called the "world's parliament".

4.4.2 The Security Council (UNSC)

The Security Council is the UN's main organ for peace and security. It has fifteen members — five permanent (the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China) and ten non-permanent ones elected for two-year terms. The Council can authorise sanctions, military action, and peacekeeping missions; its decisions are binding on all UN members. Each of the five permanent members has the power to veto any substantive decision. The internal workings of the Council, and the long-running debate about its reform, will be the focus of Part 2 of this chapter.

4.4.3 The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)

The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) is the UN's main organ for international economic, social, environmental, educational, health and human-rights matters. It has 54 members elected by the General Assembly for three-year terms, with seats distributed by region. ECOSOC coordinates the work of about fifteen specialised agencies — including the WHO, the ILO, UNESCO, the UNDP and others — and a network of functional and regional commissions. It is the home of much of the UN's work on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

4.4.4 The Trusteeship Council

The Trusteeship Council was created in 1945 to supervise the eleven "trust territories" — colonies and former mandates — placed under UN administration so that they could be guided to self-government or independence. Its work was so successful that, by 1994, all the trust territories had achieved either independence or association with another state. The Council was therefore suspended in November 1994 and has not met substantively since. The 2005 World Summit recommended that the Trusteeship Council be formally wound up — though the Charter has not yet been amended.

4.4.5 The International Court of Justice (ICJ)

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), also known as the World Court, is the UN's principal judicial organ. Its seat is at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the Netherlands — making it the only major UN organ not located in New York. The ICJ has fifteen judges elected by the GA and the Security Council for nine-year terms. It settles legal disputes between states (such as boundary disputes) and gives advisory opinions on legal questions referred by other UN organs. India has been involved in famous ICJ cases — most recently, the Kulbhushan Jadhav case (2017) concerning consular access in Pakistan.

4.4.6 The Secretariat

The Secretariat is the UN's civil service. It carries out the day-to-day work of the organisation, services the meetings of the other organs, and runs UN operations all over the world — from peacekeeping logistics to humanitarian relief. It is headed by the Secretary-General, who is appointed by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council. Tens of thousands of international civil servants work in the Secretariat, drawn from every member state.

4.5 The UN Secretaries-General — From Trygve Lie to Antonio Guterres

The Secretary-General is the UN's most visible public figure and its representative head. Since 1946, nine men and women have held the office. Their personalities and choices have shaped how much the UN could do at each moment of post-war history.

4.6 UN Membership — From 51 to 193

The UN began with 51 founding members in October 1945. As decolonisation swept through Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of new states applied for membership. The breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s added another wave of new members — fifteen successor states from the Soviet Union alone. South Sudan became the UN's 193rd and most recent member in 2011. The growth in membership tells a powerful story: today the UN includes almost every independent country on the planet.