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 remain. The first was the question of how states could be encouraged or compelled to submit their conflicts to judges for settlement; the second was how international judicial decisions, once rendered, could be effectively enforced.
The end of the Soviet system has produced massive changes in Europe. Europe now has new countries: a number of new countries has appeared out of the old Soviet Union; the two Germanies have become one; and Czechoslovakia and...