Quarante ans avec les Nations Unies

Abstract

Forty Years with the United Nations What the United Nations brought to the International Community during its forty years of life cannot be assessed only by referring to the working of the institution and the success or fallures it encountered in dealing with specifie questions or crises. The profound and lasting changes in the International Community itself in which it contributed in bringing about must also be taken into consideration. Undoubtedly, the most considerable of these changes, a mutation, in the real sense of the word, was the passage from an international society centered around Europe and North-America in 1945, to a truly world society in 1985, through the process of decolonisation. The United Nations decisively contributed to the spreading of the ideology of decolonisation, to the enactment of an international law of decolonisation and to the use of multilateral against colonial powers. Eventually, admission to the United Nations became the visible sign as well as the final step of the attainment of political independence. Another remarkable new feature of the international society oftoday, closely related to the preceding one, is the importance of groups of states, like the Seventy Seven and the Non Aligned, acting as pressure groups. This new setting was made possible only with the existence of the United Nations, where group diplomacy was able to deploy itself and to make the power of the felt. Eventually, the whole present diplomatie game, which is played at the level of the world rather than on a bilateral or regional basis in an always growing number offields, is a product of development of multilateral within the United Nations. It is specially true of the so-called North-South dialogue or confrontation. The World Organization is now an irreversible fact of international life and a reflection of the present structure of the International Society that it helped to build up. But on the other hand, it is a very novel experiment in a historical perspective. Much is y et to be learned in order to be able to make the best use of the instruments it affords for managing the world community. Le quarantieme anniversaire de I'ONU a fait lever une riche moisson d'etudes consacrees au bilan de l'action de l'Organisation dans les multiples domaines ou s'est deployee son activite, a l'histoire de ses succes, de ses echecs, des changements qu'elle a connus ou subis, ainsi qu'a des reflexions retrospectives ou prospectives sur l'efficacite des mecanismes onusiens, sur les reformes dont ils pourraient etre l'objet et a des considerations, souvent desabusees, sur l'avenir des organisations internationales, ou sur la crise qu'elles traversent. Quel que soit l'interet de ces etudes et reflexions, elles laissent de cote, semble-t-il, un aspect essentiel. On ne peut comprendre l'apport des Nations Unies au monde dans lequel nous vivons en se concentrant seulement sur l'institution et sans prendre un peu plus * Professeur a l'Universite de droit, d'economie et de sciences sociales de Paris II. Revue Etudes internationales, volume XVI, n° 4, decembre 1985