Columbia International Affairs Online
CIAO DATE: 6/5/2007
The challenge of United Nations reform
November 2004
Australian National University Department of International Relations
Abstract
The first half of the twentieth century saw multiple crises in the expanding international system, characterised most tragically and dramatically by two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Holocaust. In response, the international community engaged in history’s most ambitious program of international institution building, a program that centred on the creation of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and a plethora of functional regimes governing everything from arms control to the prohibition of genocide. Despite the impedi-ments imposed by four decades of Cold War, these institutions have evolved into a complex global architecture of institutions which can claim partial yet significant credit for the decline in traditional interstate warfare, the containment of nuclear proliferation to a handful of states, management of the world economy, and the prosecution of an ever more comprehensive humanitarian agenda.
