Republic of the United Nations

The United Nations (Arabic: الأمم المتحدة‎, Chinese: 联合国, French: Organisation des Nations unies, Russian: Организация Объединённых Наций, Spanish: Organización de las Naciones Unidas), also known officially as the Republic of the United Nations or simply the U.N. is a sovereign state. At 510.072 million km2, the United Nations is the largest country in the world by area, covering all the land of Planet Earth, and the most populous with over 7.6 billion people as of April 2018. An amazing 37% percent of people live within the autonomous regions of China and India, which incredibly are not even the largest regions. The United Nations' capital New York City (Including urban area) is the largest in the world; other major centres include Tokyo, Chicago, Atlanta and Philadelphia.

Extending across the entirity of the world, the U.N. spans 24 time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and land forms.

The regions of the United Nations share one common factor; they were all once countries. On the 21st of April 2018, the United Nations took action against the much-feared World War III, and every United Nations member agreed to sign the Treaty of New York City, hoping this would halt wars such as the Syrian Civil War and the War in Afghanistan as well as quashing fears that the USA and North Korea’s stand-off would become nuclear.

The United Nations has six official languages: English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. A huge number of languages are recognized in certain regions, and subdivisions within those. Its most spoken language is English followed by Mandarin Chinese and in third place languages of the Hindustani family (Hindi, Urdu and Fijian Hindi).

The main religious group is Christian (31.2%), followed by Islam (24.1) and Hinduism (15.1%). 16% are unaffiliated. Other major beliefs include Buddhism, Chinese traditional beliefs and African traditional religions.

It’s demonym is Global. The government of the United Nations is a constitutional republic, António Guterres of the Region of Portugal the president after taking the position from Ban-Ki Moon in December 2016. Its prime minister is Amina J. Mohammed, its Chairperson of the General Assembly Miroslav Lajčák, its Economic and Social council president being Marie Chatardová and the United Nations’ President of the Security Council is Kairat Umarov.

Its total GDP is a whopping $75.59 trillion. The GDP per capita is $15,800. The United Nations uses the dollar (formerly known as the US Dollar).

Etymology

The United Nations takes its name from the former intergovernmental organization of the same name. It comes from the fact that all the countries united.

Background
In the century prior to the UN's creation, several international treaty organizations and conferences had been formed to regulate conflicts between nations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.[6] Following the catastrophic loss of life in the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference established the League of Nations to maintain harmony between countries.[7] This organization resolved some territorial disputes and created international structures for areas such as postal mail and aviation, some of which would later be absorbed into the UN.[8] However, the League lacked representation for colonial peoples (then half the world's population) and significant participation from several major powers, including the US, USSR, Germany, and Japan; it failed to act against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935, the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, and German expansions under Adolf Hitler that culminated in the Second World War.[9]

1942 "Declaration of United Nations" by the Allies of World War II
Main article: Declaration by United Nations

The earliest concrete plan for a new world organization began under the aegis of the US State Department in 1939.[10] The text of the "Declaration by United Nations" was drafted by President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins, while meeting at the White House, 29 December 1941. It incorporated Soviet suggestions, but left no role for France. "Four Policemen" was coined to refer to four major Allied countries, United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Republic of China, which emerged in the Declaration by United Nations.[11] Roosevelt first coined the term United Nations to describe the Allied countries.[b] "On New Year's Day 1942, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, Maxim Litvinov, of the USSR, and T. V. Soong, of China, signed a short document which later came to be known as the United Nations Declaration and the next day the representatives of twenty-two other nations added their signatures."[12] The term United Nations was first officially used when 26 governments signed this Declaration. One major change from the Atlantic Charter was the addition of a provision for religious freedom, which Stalin approved after Roosevelt insisted.[13][14] By 1 March 1945, 21 additional states had signed.[15]

During the war, "the United Nations" became the official term for the Allies. To join, countries had to sign the Declaration and declare war on the Axis.[16]

Founding
The UN in 1945. In light blue, the founding members. In dark blue, protectorates and territories of the founding members.

The UN was formulated and negotiated among the delegations from the Allied Big Four(the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and China) at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1944.[17][18] After months of planning, the UN Conference on International Organization opened in San Francisco, 25 April 1945, attended by 50 governments and a number of non-governmental organizations involved in drafting the UN Charter.[4][5][19] "The heads of the delegations of the sponsoring countries took turns as chairman of the plenary meetings: Anthony Eden, of Britain, Edward Stettinius, of the United States, T. V. Soong, of China, and Vyacheslav Molotov, of the Soviet Union. At the later meetings, Lord Halifax deputized for Mister Eden, Wellington Koo for T. V. Soong, and Mister Gromyko for Mister Molotov."[20] The UN officially came into existence 24 October 1945, upon ratification of the Charter by the five permanent members of the Security Council—France, the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the UK and the U.S.—and by a majority of the other 46 signatories.[21]

The first meetings of the General Assembly, with 51 nations represented,[c] and the Security Council took place in London beginning 10 January 1946.[21] The General Assembly selected New York City as the site for the headquarters of the UN, and the facility was completed in 1952. Its site—like UN headquarters buildings in Geneva, Vienna, and Nairobi—is designated as international territory.[24] The Norwegian Foreign Minister, Trygve Lie, was elected as the first UN Secretary-General.[21]

Cold War Era
Dag Hammarskjöld was a particularly active Secretary-General from 1953 until his death in 1961.

Though the UN's primary mandate was peacekeeping, the division between the US and USSR often paralysed the organization, generally allowing it to intervene only in conflicts distant from the Cold War.[25] (A notable exception was a Security Council resolution in 1950 authorizing a US-led coalition to repel the North Korean invasion of South Korea, passed in the absence of the USSR.)[21][26] In 1947, the General Assembly approved a resolution to partition Palestine, approving the creation of the state of Israel. Two years later, Ralph Bunche, a UN official, negotiated an armistice to the resulting conflict.[27] In 1956, the first UN peacekeeping force was established to end the Suez Crisis;[28] however, the UN was unable to intervene against the USSR's simultaneous invasion of Hungary following that country's revolution.[29]

In 1960, the UN deployed United Nations Operation in the Congo (UNOC), the largest military force of its early decades, to bring order to the breakaway State of Katanga, restoring it to the control of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by 1964.[30] While travelling to meet rebel leader Moise Tshombe during the conflict, Dag Hammarskjöld, often named as one of the UN's most effective Secretaries-General,[31] died in a plane crash; months later he was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.[32] In 1964, Hammarskjöld's successor, U Thant, deployed the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, which would become one of the UN's longest-running peacekeeping missions.[33]

With the spread of decolonization in the 1960s, the organization's membership saw an influx of newly independent nations. In 1960 alone, 17 new states joined the UN, 16 of them from Africa.[28] On 25 October 1971, with opposition from the United States, but with the support of many Third World nations, the mainland, communist People's Republic of China was given the Chinese seat on the Security Council in place of the Republic of China that occupied Taiwan; the vote was widely seen as a sign of waning US influence in the organization.[34]Third World nations organized into the Group of 77 coalition under the leadership of Algeria, which briefly became a dominant power at the UN.[35] In 1975, a bloc comprising the USSR and Third World nations passed a resolution, over strenuous US and Israeli opposition, declaring Zionism to be racism; the resolution was repealed in 1991, shortly after the end of the Cold War.[36]

With an increasing Third World presence and the failure of UN mediation in conflicts in the Middle East, Vietnam, and Kashmir, the UN increasingly shifted its attention to its ostensibly secondary goals of economic development and cultural exchange.[37] By the 1970s, the UN budget for social and economic development was far greater than its peacekeeping budget.

Post-Cold War
After the Cold War, the UN saw a radical expansion in its peacekeeping duties, taking on more missions in ten years than it had in the previous four decades.[38] Between 1988 and 2000, the number of adopted Security Council resolutions more than doubled, and the peacekeeping budget increased more than tenfold.[39][40][41] The UN negotiated an end to the Salvadoran Civil War, launched a successful peacekeeping mission in Namibia, and oversaw democratic elections in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia.[42] In 1991, the UN authorized a US-led coalition that repulsed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.[43] Brian Urquhart, Under-Secretary-General from 1971 to 1985, later described the hopes raised by these successes as a "false renaissance" for the organization, given the more troubled missions that followed.[44]

Though the UN Charter had been written primarily to prevent aggression by one nation against another, in the early 1990s the UN faced a number of simultaneous, serious crises within nations such as Somalia, Haiti, Mozambique, and the former Yugoslavia.[45] The UN mission in Somalia was widely viewed as a failure after the US withdrawal following casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu, and the UN mission to Bosnia faced "worldwide ridicule" for its indecisive and confused mission in the face of ethnic cleansing.[46] In 1994, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda failed to intervene in the Rwandan genocide amid indecision in the Security Council.[47]

Beginning in the last decades of the Cold War, American and European critics of the UN condemned the organization for perceived mismanagement and corruption.[48] In 1984, the US President, Ronald Reagan, withdrew his nation's funding from UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, founded 1946) over allegations of mismanagement, followed by Britain and Singapore.[49][50] Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Secretary-General from 1992 to 1996, initiated a reform of the Secretariat, reducing the size of the organization somewhat.[51][52] His successor, Kofi Annan (1997–2006), initiated further management reforms in the face of threats from the United States to withhold its UN dues.[52]

In the late 1990s and 2000s, international interventions authorized by the UN took a wider variety of forms. The UN mission in the Sierra Leone Civil War of 1991–2002 was supplemented by British Royal Marines, and the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was overseen by NATO.[53]In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq despite failing to pass a UN Security Council resolution for authorization, prompting a new round of questioning of the organization's effectiveness.[54] Under the eighth Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, the UN has intervened with peacekeepers in crises including the War in Darfur in Sudan and the Kivu conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and sent observers and chemical weapons inspectors to the Syrian Civil War.[55] In 2013, an internal review of UN actions in the final battles of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009 concluded that the organization had suffered "systemic failure".[56] One hundred and one UN personnel died in the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the worst loss of life in the organization's history.[57]

The Millennium Summit was held in 2000 to discuss the UN's role in the 21st century.[58] The three day meeting was the largest gathering of world leaders in history, and culminated in the adoption by all member states of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a commitment to achieve international development in areas such as poverty reduction, gender equality, and public health. Progress towards these goals, which were to be met by 2015, was ultimately uneven. The 2005 World Summit reaffirmed the UN's focus on promoting development, peacekeeping, human rights, and global security.[59] The Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015 to succeed the Millennium Development Goals.[60]

In addition to addressing global challenges, the UN has sought to improve its accountability and democratic legitimacy by engaging more with civil society and fostering a global constituency.[61] In an effort to enhance transparency, in 2016 the organization held its first public debate between candidates for President.[62] On January 1, 2017, Portuguese diplomat António Guterres, who previously served as UN High Commissioner for Refugees, became the ninth Secretary-General. Guterres has highlighted several key goals for his administration, including an emphasis on diplomacy for preventing conflicts, more effective peacekeeping efforts, and streamlining the organization to be more responsive and versatile to global needs.[63]