United Nations Day

I always remember what day the United Nations was founded. It's a day before my birthday. But what I associate with United Nations Day is the school activity in which kids paint or draw flags, mount them on barbecue sticks and parade them. I saw one of my kid bros' assignments involving UN Day, and I read something about flags, the symbols of the flags, the meaning of the colors. I don't know what to say.

Of course, a discussion about the UN, its branches and its organizations might be too heavy for fourth- or fifth-grade students, so I can't blame teachers for making their students parade with flags (and national costumes). I guess the UN Day 'festival' has turned into an 'international culture day' in the Philippines, at least in the schools.

But it has been 66 years after the UN Charter came into effect, 20 years since the end of communism, and 10 years since the 9/11/11 disaster. For the world at large, today is a celebration of how the world has preserved global absence of war (not "world peace", since wars happened in every corner of the world, from Korea and Vietnam to Georgia and Somalia, not to mention the international War on Terror and its sisters the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War). No matter how many times the world has come close to again splitting into two halves, one smiting the other, it has been prevented by the grouping of all the nations of the world to provide a diplomatic venue for talks. Although, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the action was somewhat unilateral or bilateral, it was not mediated by the UN.

The UN provided the guiding principles for the age for all member countries. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Conventions on the Status of Refugees (1954), on Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1969), on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1981), on the Rights of the Child (1990), and the Millennium Development Goals (2000), have been the mainstream standard for societies in UN member-nations. Of course, the more cynical among us might say that it is a US puppet, it being housed in New York City, but the UN and the declarations it has sponsored have made the world far different today that it was in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.

Of course, there is also the Security Council. I once thought of the Security Council as the "military of the UN", but it turns out it was much more than that. The Security Council is the power-play stage of the world. The five permanent members represented the entire spectrum of political organizations of member states:
the Soviet Union, alone a dictatorial communist state;
the Republic of China, alone a dictatorial capitalist state;
France, alone a democratic socialist state;
the United States, alone a democratic capitalist state;
and the United Kingdom, alone a democratic constitutional monarchy.
Over time, the Republic of China was replaced with the People's Republic of China, a dictatorial communist state like the Soviet Union, with opposing interests to it. But it was not to remain 'communist' for long. In 1979 Deng Xiaoping took over. The PRC soon became alone a dictatorial capitalist state (with communist facade). In any case, the balance meant that if there was a conflict anywhere in the world, the Left and the Right would both have a say about it.

After communism expired in 1991, the seat of the Soviet Union went to the Russian Federation, a semi-dictatorial capitalist state. Nowadays, the division between permanent members is between interventionist (USA, UK) and isolationist (Russia, China) countries.The continental members of the EU pursue similar foreign-policy ideals, so France has its own grouping around it. This became clear with the Libyan Revolution, with Italy, and then France, supporting the NTC, while Britain simply fulfilled their no-fly zone obligations (as EU member state) and then hushed up.

Today is a good day to reflect upon the relevance of the UN in today's society. The world has grown ever closer, the people are rising up against capitalists in ways that the communists never did, using methods the communists never used. Israel and Palestine are still demanding to be heard respectively with regard to their conflict, almost as old as the UN itself. The Arab Spring has resulted in democratic governments, or general chaos, along the Maghreb and the Middle East. Countries like India, Brazil, and South Africa are manifesting their new political, economic, and cultural power. How will the UN deal with these events?