How would you fix the United Nations?

[EnglishEdward]

That link is worthy of a thread in itself.

 

[Perfection]

Kick Russia and China out of the security council.

 

[Mouthwash]

Kick Russia and China out of the security council.

That would help, but it would also remove any pretension of global legitimacy from the UN... which, to be fair, probably wouldn't be a bad thing.

There would still need to be some kind of forum for Chinese or Russians to interact with the West.

 

[inthesomeday]

Oh woah I did type Argentina didn’t I, sorry, i meant India. Wildly different words too, I must be losing my marbles.

 

[warpus]

Give each country that has veto power only 10 veto points each year.

 

[stinkubus]

Kick Russia and China out of the security council.

China is far too important to the global economy today to attempt to isolate it. Russia's involvement in the middle east and considerable exports of natural gas and oil to Europe also mean it cannot be so easily isolated.

 

[inthesomeday]

Replace the US on the security council with the DPRK.

 

[Yeekim]

Have the UN buy this company and use the profits to finance its operations, among lots of other things.

We use "old-fashioned" door cards at work, including for paying for coffee.
Each morning I go for coffee and more often than not forget the card. Then I wish for such a microchip.

EDIT: As for the topic, the UN works as well as can be expected. There's no "fixing" it.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I think the only way to really "fix" the United Nations is legal supremacy. Like the EU has. But nobody wants that.

But I want to also say that even if the UN is "Broken" in many ways, at the bottom line, it is still a great net gain and of immense value. International politics is just still so messy and anarchistic that you can't and shouldn't expect things to move smoothly or without jarring contradictions and failures.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I think the only way to really "fix" the United Nations is legal supremacy. Like the EU has. But nobody wants that.

For the sake of pedantry, EU law has primacy over members laws, not supremacy.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Well if you really want to be pedantic: EU law does not exist, only EU regulations and EU courts. And member nations have to adopt the regulations and make them into law, and their courts have to bow to the EU courts. Yes technically, member nations do what they do out of their own free will, but in practice, there is a clear primacy embedded, it becomes clear in the part I marked cursive.
There are no UN courts. The mere idea seems laughable. There is an international court nobody takes serious and who is reserved for people no one with power cares about. In the end, people do what they want, and UN "laws" are not that much more than suggestions. What decides is raw power, not law.
In the EU, law is the raw power.

 

[Yeekim]

And member nations have to adopt the regulations and make them into law

If we are being pedantic, regulations are directly applicable, whilst directives need to be transposed into law of Member States.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

^^I was going to be padantic about that too. In fact EU have lots of laws in different flavors even if they dont call them laws (lets call them juridical rules for instance). Starting from the constitutive treaties, which are more like the EU Constitution, derived legislation produced by EU institutions are authentic laws which are directly applicable in member countries (reglaments and others, which even private individuals can invoke against other private individuals) or need to be converted in national laws first (directives).

So yes, members laws and tribunals must bow to EU laws and justice tribunal. But it is a voluntary bow as member countries signed the treaties voluntarily. Each member own Constitution still reign supreme inside each nation to the point it needs to be modified if it is contrary to the treaties in any point (in Spain it happened two times). If the country wants to remain in the EU, that is it.

 

[Hrothbern]

The purpose of a "UN resolution" is to stop arms sales to the target. If one of the five largest arms dealers in the world considers them a valued customer and defies the resolution not only is the resolution ineffective, but the UN is in a position where they have to try to censure one of the five largest arms dealers, which eliminates any control that may be exerted over that arms dealer in the future. So those five are given "veto power" in order to prevent any order being given that they would ignore.

So, my short answer would be that yes, the UN is working.

It isn't working as well as one might hope, because it has no real power over the largest arms dealers in the world. But in those cases where the largest arms dealers in the world can agree on a customer that deserves to be blacklisted that customer is really stuck. And when a rogue nation like Israel or Syria has to maintain sufficient decency to keep at least ONE of the big five on their side it does impose some limitations on their behavior, which does reduce the risk of a major war and does reduce the number of small wars.

Yes
Roundabout the pragmatical root cause of existence

I would like to add the effects of public and hidden..... and the effects of opaque consensus processes, that are typical more like icebergs, most of what happens invisible.
What we see in the media is the public theatre at the main original attribute of the UN: the public negotiation table
What we do not see are the successes and lost opportunities of hidden diplomacy, the ones where the very nature of (possible) solutions for success make secrecy and confidentiality mandatory. Loss of face being avoided.

So if you make your judgement on the UN only by what you read in terms of public statements in the public media, befitting the (here naive) accountability culture, the main engine of the first layer of the press (often completely dominating all other things that ARE also in the total equation).......
Well..... that is imo in the realm of unrealistic and/or utopian.
Unrealistic if you believe that the hidden, opaque consensus part does not happen.
Utopian if you think that everything in the UN should be transparent, (hidden) diplomacy is not really needed, and loss of face of countries/governments/players can be ignored, without a negative impact on solutions satisfying higher goals of the UN.

So to come to a judgement on how well the UN functions, you really need a lot of inside information.... and because "we" lack that, "we" have to speculate what happens hidden, what happens at diplomatic level.
And yes... sometimes a leak, or more likely a poltical manoevre will lift a tip of the many veils.

So all in all, the UN offers that very practical negotiation table and for the public part at and around that table all players are usually able to preach each to their own choir they did well
and what really has been achieved around that negotiation table is seldom accountable or has been accounted to the right persons or entities.

Back to the OP:
If we "fix" the UN.... how and where will we have another standing platform for diplomacy ?
or are we going to do everything by ad hoc bilaterals, multilaterals ???

That would be going back to the Stone Age in more than one sense I am afraid.

 

[luiz]

At the absolute very least make the permanent security council members impermanent. The excuse for putting them there doesn’t even make any sense, France didn’t contribute to the war effort anywhere near as much as, like, Australia, or Argentina.

How did Argentina contribute to WW2 more than France? By offering safe haven to Nazis after the war?

More generally, what history books have you been reading? Throw them in the garbage. And sue your school.

 

[inthesomeday]

How did Argentina contribute to WW2 more than France? By offering safe haven to Nazis after the war?

More generally, what history books have you been reading? Throw them in the garbage. And sue your school.

I am not sure that Argentina as a country did very much during WW2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina_during_World_War_II

Declaring war when Germany had clearly lost e.g. six weeks before surrendering hardly counts.

Oh woah I did type Argentina didn’t I, sorry, i meant India. Wildly different words too, I must be losing my marbles.

 

[Akka]

As usual, supranational institutions are caught between the "dictatorship" and "useless" accusations.
UN is like EU : they're awesome and have brought countless improvements, but those are so taken for granted and people have such an Hollywoodesque vision of politics, that they simply see the failures or the difficulties and not the positive.

 

[luiz]

@inthesomeday:
My bad. But in this case the answer to your question is rather obvious. Both India and Australia (and also Canada, which made a huge contribution to the war) were "represented" by the UK. There was no independent India back then.

Of course the real issue in 2018 is no longer who made a big contribution to the war. France is a nuclear power and a major economy and obviously should be there. But so should Germany and Japan, and indeed India as you said.

 

[Broken_Erika]

The UN needs a rumble pit for solving disputes.
Like this:

 

[inthesomeday]

@inthesomeday:
My bad. But in this case the answer to your question is rather obvious. Both India and Australia (and also Canada, which made a huge contribution to the war) were "represented" by the UK. There was no independent India back then.

Of course the real issue in 2018 is no longer who made a big contribution to the war. France is a nuclear power and a major economy and obviously should be there. But so should Germany and Japan, and indeed India as you said.

In 2018 I think the global geopolitical situation is a lot more stable than it was in 1945, and most countries have at least basically operational governments. There’s really no need to concentrate the power of international diplomacy into the hands of the largest economies, in fact it’s pretty much counterintuitive to the idealistic concept of the U.N. There shouldn’t really be any permanent members of the security council.