An informal demonstration project: what the UN could be

The United  Nations (UN) does an amazing amount of - largely unknown - good in the world. 

Typically, most people think of the UN in terms of avoiding war, and consider it sceptically - and true, the UN has not eliminated war, but we have not had a third physical-conflict world war (although the "balance of terror" of nuclear weapons in the Cold War may have had more to do with that), and there have been steps along the way that improved the chances of peace. Those include UN organisations such as the International  Court of Justice (a revamp of the League of Nations' Permanent Court of International Justice), the ICC - and the UN's work on promoting and achieving human rights has been major (e.g., see here, here). 

But on top of that, it is all the unseen things that the UN does that are important - international agreements on international air travel, international postal services, international weather forecasting, the World health Organisation, etc (see here). 

Humanitarian aid to areas in need is another. 

Overall, I consider the UN to be essential - largely because of what it does outside public scrutiny. 

But there is no doubt that there are problems at the UN - some organisational, but many in the category that people are concerned about: politics and peace. (I've written about this before - see here and here.)

There are major problems there largely because of one of the inbuilt flaws that allowed the UN to come in to being: the veto power in the UN. That in turn reflects the problem of international power politics.

HG Wells, in "The Rights of Man", proposed an organisation of "the parliamentary peoples of the world" be created after World War (part) Two. We didn't get that - and, while what we got is, in some ways, better (the dictatorships have a seat at the table, rather than being excluded - which will only mean something if they are constructively engaged in a way that edges their nations towards a better state of being), in other ways it isn't (the smaller dictatorships are too often used as props for bigger nations). 

To help illustrate that, what if some rich billionaire or organisation founded an open, without power, "shadow" version of the UN, but limited to nations that are reasonably free (based on Freedom  House  ratings of free/partly free or consolidated/semi-consolidated democracy) and reasonably respecting of human rights (typified by signing up to and ratifying the major international human rights treaties)? 

We could see how decision making would go on a range of topics, how the Human Rights Council could really function, and we could see more clearly how bigger nations are abusing their power. 

It would take some spending to set up - do it online to avoid needing physical infrastructure, but people to be credible representatives of those nations in an exercise of this nature would probably need to be paid for their time, and there would have to be a considerable publicity mechanism for this to have much impact. 

What would that impact lead to? 

Hopefully public pressure for nations to do better. 

In a word, accountability. 

Some other reading that may be of in interest on that includes: 

• https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-13/chinas-rise-exposes-the-myth-of-the-liberal-global-order/12974390; 
• my posts here, here, and here; and 
• this article, which led to this post: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/legal-case-defending-taiwan.