The United Nations: past and present

The UN is approaching its seventieth birthday in 2015. Kofi Annan, its seventh secretary general, and the only incumbent not to have come from a national government, has written the most honest and insightful memoir of any occupant of the thirty‐eighth floor, Interventions. Despite terrible setbacks in Bosnia and Rwanda, the United Nations remains the most representative and successful international organization in history. As Mark Mazower points out in his Governing the world, an acutely penetrating history of international governance, the successes of the UN are more than the founders of the ill‐fated League of Nations could have dreamt of. Mazower's tour de force combines a history of the intellectual ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their eventual realization in the League of Nations and the UN. While his conclusions question whether faith in international institutions has been lost, the reality of universal membership of the UN and establishment of an International Criminal Court might suggest otherwise.     

联合国与丝绸之路

联合国开发计划署2006年6月1日宣布在中国设立丝绸之路投资论坛,以促进丝绸之路沿线各国的发展,并将首次会议定在丝绸之路的起点城市西安举行。联合国开发计划署推出这个论坛,得到了联合国和中国一些机构的支持。论坛的设立促进了丝绸之路沿线国家和地区的经济文化发展,为推动世界和平与发展做出了重要贡献。     

美国与1966年联合国中国代表权问题

1964年以后,国际社会支持中国恢复在联合国席位的力量日益增强。在1966年联合国关于中国代表权问题的讨论中,为阻止中国进入联合国,美国投入了极大的精力。在这一过程中,美国及其盟国和蒋介石集团发生了尖锐的矛盾,经过讨价还价,美国在盟国的压力下作了相应的让步,美蒋最终达成妥协,中国仍然被排除在联合国之外。     

The United States, The United Nations and Iraq: 'Multilateralism of a kind'

Much is made of the need for any second war against Iraq (following Desert Storm of 1991) to be sanctioned by a resolution of the UN Security Council, approved necessarily by all five Permanent Members. Yet only two of the five, the USA and the UK, show any enthusiasm for renewed war in the Persian Gulf; and British policy is undeniably following rather than leading American actions on the diplomatic and military fronts. What are the sources of this American policy? Some critics say oil; the latest arguments of proponents invoke humanitarian concerns; somewhere between the two are those who desire ‘regime change’ to create the economic and political conditions in which so‐called western political, economic and social values can flourish. To understand the present crisis and its likely evolution this article examines American relations with Iraq in particular, the Persian Gulf more generally and the Middle East as a region since the Second World War. A study of these international relations combined with a critical approach to the history of American actions and attitudes towards the United Nations shows that the United States continues to pursue a diplomacy blending, as occasion suits, the traditional binaries of multilateralism and unilateralism—yet in the new world‐wide ‘war on terrorism’. The question remains whether the chosen means of fighting this war will inevitably lead to a pyrrhic victory for the United States and its ad hoc allies in the looming confrontation with Iraq.