United Nations Myth #5:

The world community hasn't changed significantly enough since the U.N. founding to warrant a comprehensive new vision for the world body.

Sixty years of effort since the time of Yalta, — and the subsequent agreement among 51 nations who lent their signatures to the United Nations charter — have certainly brought victories and accomplishments. At the same time, there is much work that remains to be done. Peace remains as evasive as ever, as terrorism, international crime, intra-state conflict and violence, as well as inter-state conflicts have continued.

Our world today has changed dramatically from the world of 1945. The United Nations emerged in its own unique context. Although renewal and reform have been encouraged and attempted, global shifts and changes in alliances, economies, military blocs and technologies are more rapid than the UN's ability to respond.

The United Nations is a club made up of member states. Religions, NGOs, private sector and civil society actors are subordinate and external to the logic of national sovereignty, and the linear hierarchy that leads upward from individual citizen, to government, to government representative, to the United Nations system.

The nation-state itself is in decline as the central organizational unit for human loyalty, identity and action. Nation-states in the era of globalization, are not the power-players they once were. We now live in an age where non-state actors, from terrorists, to international organized crime, to transnational corporations, to religions and NGOs — act beyond allegiance to any national center of power. Nations alone are ill-equipped to respond to, or effectively address, the problems we face in this global age.

The world has come to think of itself differently than it did in 1945 and the world community requires a correspondingly different United Nations.

Excerpt from: "The Universal Peace Federation" by Dr. Thomas Walsh