Abstract
The image of the United Nations offered by the perceptive Conor Cruise O’Brien* suggests an institution that functions at the behest of power, a hapless pawn manipulated to serve realpolitik ends.1 This is a refreshing analysis. Behind all the dispassionate portrayals in the text-books there is another United Nations, a complex organisation operating in the real world. Here some factual information about the components of the United Nations is included, with clues also to the other reality.
It [the United Nations] is basically a spiritual-political institution in the line of descent from the ancient shrine at Delphi and the medieval papacy. As with those institutions, the powerful have recourse to the UN in times of crisis …
Conor Cruise O’Brien, 1993
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Notes
Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Saving faces, and maybe the world’, The Independent (London), 30 April 1993.
Michael Akehurst, A Modern Introduction to International Law, 6th edn (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991) p. 207.
These and other subsequent details are taken from Edmund Jan Osmanczyk, Encyclopedia of the United Nations and International Agreements, 2nd edn (New York: Taylor and Taylor, 1990).
Evan Luard, The United Nations. How it Works and What it Does (London: Macmillan, 1979).
See, for example, ‘Provisional Rules of Procedure in the Security Council’, in Anjali V. Patii, The UN Veto in World Affairs, 1946–1990: A Complete Record and Case Histories of the Security Council’s Veto (Sarasota, Fla: UNIFO/Mansell, 1992) pp. 545–54.
Trygve Lie, In the Cause of Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1954) p. 42.
Ernest Gross, Dag Hammarskjöld as Secretary-General, Oral History Project (New York: Columbia University, 1964) p. 36a.
See Peter Körner, Gero Maass, Thomas Siebold and Rainer Tetzlaff, The IMF and the Debt Crisis (London: Zed Books, 1992) pp. 42–73.
Richard Dowden, ‘Nairobi halts IMF and World Bank reforms’, The Independent (London), 24 March 1993.
Peter Pringle, ‘IMF deal means trouble in store for Yeltsin’, The Independent (London), 15 July 1992.
Hugh O’Shaughnessy, ‘UN’s World Bank condemned for ‘immoral’ profits’, The Observer (London), 22 April 11990.
See also Ken Ringle, ‘The man who broke open the World Bank’, The Sunday Times (London), 30 September 1990.
Julius Nyerere, ‘Foreword’ to Chakravarthi Raghavan, Recolonization: GATT, the Uruguay Round and the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1990).
For an insider’s view of UNESCO, see Richard Hoggart, An Idea and its Servants: UNESCO from Within (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978)
see also In the Minds of Men: Unesco 1946 to 1971 (Paris: Unesco, 1972)
Leonard Doyle, ‘Sick tactics in battle for health chief’s job’, The Independent on Sunday (London), 10 January 1993.
Michael Sheridan, ‘World health chief faces fraud enquiry’, ‘The Independent on Sunday (London), 28 February 1993
James Adams, ‘Critics battle to oust “disastrous” WHO chief’, The Sunday Times (London), 18 April 1993.
See Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option (London: Faber & Faber, 1991).
Nick Rufford, David Leppard and Ian Burrell, ‘North Koreans build secret A-bomb plant’, The Sunday Times (London), 4 April 1993.
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© 1994 Geoff Simons
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Simons, G. (1994). Profile. In: The United Nations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23389-2_3
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