Ten Balances for Weighing UN Reform Proposals

Abstract

This is a time, following its fiftieth anniversary, for renewed interest in reforming, restructuring, and reinvigorating the United Nations. By some reasonable standards, parts of the UN have worked well much of the time, and others have not. The challenges facing the organization have changed, with new emphasis on civil conflict within rather than between states,' population growth, massive voluntary and involuntary migrations, environmental degradation, economic justice, expanded concepts of human rights, and belief in the possibility and the necessity of representative government. The resources the UN commands, and the will of its member states to employ the organization, are inadequate to meet those challenges. Consequently, several major comprehensive proposals to restructure the UN have been put forth, as well as many partial ones.2 Even at its creation, the UN was, for all the realism attached to its new institutions of collective security, also in substantial degree a liberal internationalist project in the sense derived from the vision of Immanuel Kant's essay, Zum Ewigen Frieden (On Perpetual