"Maintain international peace and security and, to this end, take effective collective measures to prevent and remove threats to peace".
Thus reads the first article of the United Nations Charter, the international organization born in 1945 on the ashes of the Second World War with the purpose of defending world peace.
After the conflict, in fact, the trauma of the terrible tragedy experienced by humanity encouraged the will of all States to re-establish the entire international system on different bases, capable of protecting the world forever from other follies. On the one hand, there was an attempt to close the accounts with the past: it was a difficult attempt, not without contradictions and real dramas. The most striking event in this regard was the Nuremberg trial, held between November 1945 and October 1946, destined to leave an indelible mark on the conscience of peoples and in international jurisprudence.
UN: how is the United Nations born?
The first document that according to some historians can be considered the launch of the United Nations is the Atlantic Charter drafted by the United States and the United Kingdom in August 1941, about two years after the start of World War II. A few months later the contents of that first Declaration were repeated in the United Nations Declaration, a document signed by the main powers at war against the Axis, namely the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia and China, plus another 26 countries. It was the first time that the term "United NationsWhich throughout the war would often have been used to refer to those who today identify as "the allies". The new rules of coexistence were then formalized during the San Francisco Conference with the birth, on June 26, 1945, of the United Nations Organization (UN).
The UN set out to replace the previous League of Nations, a similar organization created 25 years earlier, which had completely failed in its main objective: to prevent the start of a new world war; in fact, the ambitions and rivalries of the individual states had proved too difficult obstacles to overcome, and the fact that the United States, the main promoters of the League of Nations, had decided not to join it took away most of the possibilities for the organization. it had to influence member countries. However, it inherited most of its guiding principles, starting with that of the equality of nations, all with the right to vote in the General Assembly, the highest deliberative body of the UN.
As a counterweight, the Security Council was created, whose decisions were binding on fundamental issues, such as changes to the statute, the accession of new states and some particularly important interventions, for example military actions. It was made up of fifteen members, ten elected in turn from among all the States, five permanent ones - USA, USSR, Great Britain, France and, starting from 1971, China to replace Taiwan - with the right of veto, a right of which above all The USSR and the US made such extensive use that they became a powerful brake on UN activity. Like the League of Nations, the UN too often found itself in breach of the two objectives it had set itself: "to save future generations from the scourge of war" and "to promote the economic and social progress of all peoples" .
UN inspiring principles
The statement contained a series of principles who would be considered ambitious and idealistic even today. The war, it was written, should not have led to territorial enlargements for any of the belligerents, at the end of hostilities the peoples would have had the right to self-determination and their human and political rights should have been respected. The statements had other contents, such as a commitment to fight against Germany, Japan and Italy without signing separate agreements, stipulating that there should be no separate peace until victory.
There was also a considerable amount of hypocrisy on the part of many of the contractors in the statements. The United Kingdom, for example, owned colonies in nearly a third of the world and had dozens of peoples under it who had never been asked what they thought of the British government. The Soviet Union had millions of citizens imprisoned in the gulags and in those years it was proceeding to move millions of its citizens of ethnic groups considered "infidels" from one corner of the country to another.
Goals achieved and missed
However, 73 years have passed and so far there has never been a third world war. Another world conflict could have been even more devastating than the first two, given the rush to nuclear weapons during and after the Cold War. Over the years, its powers have expanded, from efforts against the spread of epidemics to those to limit malnutrition and discrimination. UN activities have also failed: for example, in 1994 the UN peacekeepers failed to prevent the genocide of nearly one million people in Rwanda.
The UN has also achieved great successes, such as the eradication of smallpox in 1980. In recent years the World Health Organization, one of the agencies that are part of the UN, has come one step away from the eradication of polio. Today there is much discussion about what the future of the UN will be, what its contribution has been in the past and how the organization can be reformed to make it more efficient. What is certain is that without the United Nations the last 73 years would have been a very different time.
