The Parliament of Man - The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations

Description

The Parliament of Man is the first definitive history of the United Nations, from one of America's greatest living historians.Distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy, author of the bestselling The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, gives us a thorough and timely account that explains the UN's roots and functions while also casting an objective eye on its effectiveness and its prospects for success in meeting the challenges that lie ahead. Kennedy shows the UN for what it is: fallible, human-based, often dependent on the whims of powerful national governments or the foibles of individual administrators—yet also utterly indispensable. With his insightful grasp of six decades of global history, Kennedy convincingly argues that "it is difficult to imagine how much more riven and ruinous our world of six billion people would be if there had been no UN." A Note on the Title xi Preface «ii PART 1 The Origins CHAPTER 1 The Troubled Advance to a New World Order, 1815-1945 3 PART 2 The Evolution of the Many UNs Since 1945 CHAPTER 2 The Conundrum of the Security Council 31 CHAPTER 3 Peacekeeping and Warmaking 77 CHAPTER 4 Economic Agendas, North and South 113 CHAPTER 5 The Softer Face of the UN's Mission 143 CHAPTER 6 Advancing International Human Rights 177 CHAPTER 7 "We the Peoples": Democracy, Governments, and Nongovernmental Actors 206 PART 3 The Present and the Future CHAPTER 8 The Promise and the Peril of the Twenty-first Century 243 Afterword 281 Acknowledgments 291 Notes 295 Appendix: Charter of the United Nations 313 Index