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Title: The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (Vintage)
ISBN: 0375703411
Author:
Paul Kennedy
Publicate Date: 2007-09-04
Publish: 2007-09-04
List Price: $15.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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1: "A Troubled Advance to a New World Order"
The title The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations" evolves from a 19th century poem of Alfred Tennyson about the nations of the world uniting to prevent war. As a historian, the author has portrayed a BIG picture of intellectual work, by philosophical discourse on peace and war.
The chapter on "A Troubled Advance to a New World Order" would get the readers visualise the real circumstances of the UN's founding at the end of World War II.
On the whole, it's a masterpiece that illustrates how the UN holds the highest potential for the attainment of Alfred Tennyson's quest for peace emphasising on the development ever since its establishment, owing largely to its universal legitimacy.
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2: Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo: The UN 60 Years On
Today (February 7, 2008), 1,700 Blue helmets sit at the edge of the abyss in East Africa. The UN peacekeepers between Eritrea and Ethiopia are currently struggling without fuel and Eritrea will not allow it to refuel. It shows the powerlessness of the UN organization and its Utopian dreams of world peace. Yet, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has no plans to withdraw the troops because according to one UN official, "Abandoning our positions would sanctify a resumption of the conflict." Thus it shows the resolve of the organization and the good it does ameliorating conflict.
The UN is probably both the most hated and the most beloved international organization. It is both the image of why we cannot work together because of realist interests and why the world can do great things - such as the drive to eradicate small pox. In his Parliament of Man, Paul Kennedy describes the good, the bad and the ugly of the UN as it turns 60 years old. Kennedy also attempts to find a way forward for the world organization, which he feels if it didn't exist we'd have to invent it or parts of it.
The possible ugliness is palpable. To many critics in the conservative US, and elsewhere, the UN is seen as a dangerous attempt at world government. The various organs argue for human rights and for collective action on issues that would contradict the sovereignty of nations. The Security Council resolutions are binding and therefore must be observed by all within the organization. The Secretary General is often seen by such people as an aspirant world President. The questions of national sovereignty vis-a- vis such a universal organ is something appears to be in need of resolution constantly.
Even when there is not the question of national sovereignty at stake, the UN has its detractors. It seems ridiculous that Libya should head the Human Rights committee. Peacekeeping missions are often weak and only in position to be targets from either side of the dispute. Further, the dream of a Parliament of Man is lacking when the General Assembly cannot have binding resolutions. Some therefore, dismiss the UN's utopian dream as impossible.
Yet is it really the UN's dream? The actions of subgroups of the UN, such as UNICEF, is highly lauded. There is no one who does not see the good much of the UN does. The UNESCO group on defending cultural and natural "heritage sites" is something most people believe should happen so we can pass our history to our grandchildren. All too often there is, like in Eritrea, only a thin blue line between peace and chaos. Moreover, the UN offers a forum for debate and expression of views that can be found nowhere else.
Kennedy spells out this good, bad and ugly. He poses the case for reform, by analyzing both sides, the UN should do more people and the do less people. He finds that it should be tweaked while revolutionary change is impossible and perhaps unwarranted. Kennedy brings to this book the fantastic writing and clear analysis that he brought to his other works. All too often we dismiss international organizations and many attack their usefulness both from the right and the left; but what is that the computer tech tells Charlie in The West Wing: "if they're shooting at you, you know you're doing something right."
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3: So-So
Kennedy's problems start with the title. It's great to quote from Tennyson, but the UN is hardly The Parliament of Man. It is a Parliament of governments, some of which legitimately represent their citizens because they are elected and some of which jail without trial, torture and/or kill their citizens. A second problem -- his numerous fiat-like assertions arbitrarily and falsely preempt debate. "However, to any reasonable person nowadays, it is outrageous that a 5 of the 191 sovereign states that make up the United Nations have special powers and privileges." He may be correct, probably is, but to seek to control the terms of debate with such a sweeping statement is the authorial equivalent of "have you stopped beating your wife?" Third, his views on the Security Council vs. General Assembly role in the organization are essentially black and white. The Security Council is generally lambasted as a cause of the UN's immobility and ineffectiveness. The General Assembly's half-century of weak performance pretty much gets off with the lightest of wrist slaps or is blamed on the limitations placed on it by the UN Charter. Whenever Kennedy is critical of something or someone inside or outside the UN, the person or institution is often modified by the word "conservative", again as if to pin most of the UN's problems on conservatives. Certainly there is some validity to that charge, but it's another example of an author pushing his views so hard that it undercuts what Parliament should and could have been, an even-handed contribution to the debate about how to begin reforming the UN so that the only game in town for global community action can be more effective in that action.
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4: Kennedy could have done better!
There's probably no better qualified writer for a history of the UN and assessment of its prospects. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was an important and influential book, and the formation of the UN around the alliance of the victorious Allies really was the last collaboration among them. As the driver of the Great Powers School of geopolitical thinking, Kennedy was the right author for an analysis of the UN. Having a strong interest in the UN, I looked for a good history of analysis a few years back, and discovered the last one, by an LA Times reporter, was a decade old and out of print. It was wonderful to learn that a seminal historian would tackle the subject.
But at a time when most organizations are undergoing serious scrutiny for their roles in failing to capture the peace dividend, or serious lapses of intelligence and execution, in Kennedy's book the UN hardly gets any tough analysis. It is truly inexplicable that Srebrenica not get reviewed, or even Oil-for-Food Scandal.
The book not only overlooks what's important, it's boring. Yes, instead of looking at the organization from the ground up, he peers at it through a stack of paper. He wades through the verbiage of its self-definition, then bogs down in all its silly acronyms.
Here's what he should have written about: The UN is as DOA as the League of Nations unless it can rebalance membership in the Permanent Security Council to reflect the latent military clout of the current world. At heart, all the UN is an alliance between nations that were victorious 60-years ago. It will lose all purchase unless it can reflect probable military realities. Either it will change, or disappear. Hey, that would be a bad thing.
Reading the acknowledgements after the long boring platitudinous slog, I realized the problem. The UN commissioned Kennedy to write about the UN's situation. That explains how boring and polite this book is, purged of all drama. And that's duplicitous on Kennedy's part - especially if he got paid for his analysis, and then used the same material for a supposedly unbiased book.
Rewrite it with some teeth!
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5: a solid but somewhat dry overview of the UN
As a reporter who has covered the UN, I read this book around the time I first came here. It is helpful for understanding the basic layout of the organization, its history and purpose, which are things that I was completely in the dark on before I came here and rather suspect most of my countrymen are ill-informed on as well. The chapter on the history of the Security Council is extremely helpful in getting a basic understanding of the UN's role in major foreign affairs in the past 60 years. However, this book is often dry and rambly in its later stages, and just doesn't have that much to say about, say, NGOs and civil society. By contrast, I found James Traub's "The Best Intentions," on the twilight of the Kofi Annan years here, to be a more engaging, if slightly less objectively detached, treatise of the United Nations.
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