The United Nations after the Cold War

The United Nations faces a new power structure in the world with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc. This provides a new opportunity to reconstitute the UN so that it more clearly fulfills the original purpose of the United Nations, which was to avoid conflict or to settle it without force. The new paradigm may be bolstering international law and arbitration in order to judge the actions of nations according to ethical standards.

After World War I, many of the nations of the world tried to address one of the issues that had interested idealists for some time--the creation of some means for international adjudication as a way of authoritatively and peacefully settling international disputes. One of the institutions that emerged from this war was the League of Nations, a forerunner of the United Nations but with little authority or power and destined to fail as an arbiter of international matters. There were various precedents for international arbitration even at that time, though, and among the other institutions that emerged, based on such precedents, was history's first permanent international law court, the Permanent Court of International Justice, as part of the League of Nations. This court would collapse along with the League of Nations in 1945, but a more or less identical tribunal, the International Court of Justice, would replace it as the judicial branch of the new United Nations. Even then, two of history's fundamental problems in law would

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n the Baltic region is the single greatest immediate threat to the post-Cold War era in Europe. It is fraught with uncertainties and is a volatile situation that seems to change daily. The West is having difficulty picking a side to support and is clearly failing to serve as a mediating influence at any level. It appears that the changes that have taken place in Eastern Europe are altering forever the Europe that originally set out on the road to economic integration, facing as they do a radically changed political economy. Many believe that the success or failure of post-Communist Europe's transition to multiparty democracy and market economics will determine whether the European order that takes shape will mirror the vision of 1992 or produce a quagmire of national fragmentation and ethnic conflict. The Warsaw pact has dissolved, leaving the countries of Eastern Europe trying to provide for their own internal security, which may become a desire to satisfy regional foreign policy objectives. This also means, tough, that there is unlikely to be a "peace dividend" for post-Communist Europe, and fear of national and ethnic regional conflict may not allow post-Communist leaders to reduce their armed forces or to redirect the fl

Category: Government - T