The Parliament of Man

The signing of the United Nations Charter in 1945 was an unprecedented development in the history of humankind. For the first time ever the world’s most powerful sovereign nation states came together to create an autonomous organization designed to, in the Charter’s own words, "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war [and] reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights." Sixty years later, the U.N. still doggedly pursues that mandate, albeit not without difficulty and certainly not without criticism.

‍

In The Parliament of Man, the distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy gives a thorough and timely six-decades-long history of the United Nations that explains the institution’s roots and it functions, while also casting an objective eye on the U.N.’s effectiveness as a body and on its prospects for future success in meeting the challenges that lie ahead.

‍

Building on his expertise gained in drafting official reports on how to improve the U.N.’s performance for its fiftieth anniversary, Kennedy makes sense of the many commissions and committees, and how the organization’s six main operating bodies — General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council (UNESCO), Trusteeship Council, Secretariat, and The International Court — operate and interact.

‍

As a body, the U.N. emerges here for what it is: Fallible, human-based, oftentimes dependent on the whims of powerful national governments or the foibles of individual senior U.N. administrators, but utterly indispensable. In The Parliament of Man, Kennedy ably contends that "it is difficult to imagine how riven and ruinous our world of six billion people would be if there had been no U.N. social, environmental, and cultural agendas — and no institutions to attempt . . . to put them into practice on the ground."

‍

Penguin (26 July 2007)

‍