With humanity now making its impact felt on a global scale, there is clearly no sustainable future for humanity without some form of global governance that is able to moderate and control that impact. That is not necessarily the same thing as a world “government” as such. But there must be a way to make collective decisions for the whole human family and to be able to enforce those decisions.
Without a functioning system of global governance, there is literally a zero possibility of solving the problems that could very well lead to our early extinction. Climate change is an obvious example of a problem that has no national borders and cannot be solved by any single country in isolation. Either all countries work together to reverse global carbon emissions, or all countries will suffer the consequences.
Similarly with nuclear weapons: so long as one country insists on having nuclear weapons, others are unwilling to leave themselves vulnerable to a nuclear attack. If all agree to give them up, no one country will feel the need to have them.
But to eliminate the possibility of nuclear war completely, all countries must agree, not only to give up their nuclear weapons, but to allow – forever – the monitoring and inspections needed to verify that no one can ever “cheat” in the future. And there must ultimately be a willingness and capability to use force, if necessary, to stop any such attempt at nuclear “cheating.”
These are by no means impossible conditions for countries like the United States or Russia to accept. They have already accepted similar conditions for ensuring the permanent elimination of chemical weapons, for instance, and have so far they have abided by those conditions. And among the class of “weapons of mass destruction” that pose an existential threat to humanity, nuclear weapons are, by far, the easiest to monitor and verify.
The United Nations was set up at the end of World War II “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The UN, together with its associated agencies and treaty organizations, represents our best chance at creating a functioning system of world governance. It has numerous tools at its disposal for the peaceful resolution of conflicts, including diplomacy, mediation, legal proceedings and as a last resort, military intervention to stop the fighting.
But as currently constituted, the United Nations also has its flaws and challenges. The core of decision-making power and responsibility lies with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. But since these five countries rarely agree about anything of real importance, and especially not anything directly involving one of them, the UN Security Council, and hence the entire UN system, is unable to solve the world’s most urgent problems.
For instance, all countries that join the UN agree to refrain from making war on others, and even the so-called “inherent right of self-defence” is severely circumscribed by the procedures laid out in the UN Charter.
According to the UN Charter,[1] a country may fight back in self-defense only in the case of being directly attacked – not in the case of an “imminent” attack or of suspecting an attack or for any other spurious reason. And even in the case of being directly attacked, a country may act in self-defense only until such time as the UN Security Council has decided what course of action to take in order to restore the peace.
But so long as countries like the United States and Russia insist on the right to go to war to get what they want, irrespective of their commitments under the UN Charter, the UN Security Council is impotent to stop them. And the world as a whole is not safe from the threat of war or from the possibility of total war, with or without nuclear weapons.
There have been many attempts to “reform” the United Nations and many suggestions for how to make it truly effective. However, the real problem is not how the United Nations is currently structured. The problem is how people in certain countries like the United States view the rest of the world.
So long as most US-Americans are unable to imagine themselves as an integral part of a wider world that extends beyond their own borders, no amount of tinkering with the membership or voting privileges of the UN Security Council is going to make the UN suddenly work as it should.
If and when people in the United States – and the politicians they elect – feel truly part of one single world community, at that point it will no longer be a problem to fix the UN system – or to devise a completely new system if necessary. Until that happens, the future of humanity remains in doubt.
[1] See Article 51 of the UN Charter: https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml