The paradigm of international relations has changed so significantly that it is fair to say that a new era has begun, one that offers hope, but no certainty, that the failed dreams of the past can be realized. A rare and still fragile unanimity has become evident: that this new era demands a multilateral approach to the resolution of its problems, some inherited from the past, some born in the chaos of adjustment to new conditions of wider freedom, of hatreds reborn, and of growing challenges to the habitat required for human security.
The United Nations has come to the fore as the instrument of choice to bring peace and productive change. With its new prominence has come proof of enhanced effectiveness and unprecedented responsibilities, along with evidence of imperfections and unpreparedness. The United Nations, after all, was born for a different era, the inheritor of many of the norms and a portion of the structure of an organization, the League of Nations that had failed (Michael Quinn Patton, 1986, pp. 345-7).
UN's viability as a change agent derives more from raw idealism than a realistic assessment of the underpinnings of world politics. Is it undue optimism, sheer naiveté, to posit a trendline that ascribes greater authority, competence, effectiveness, and status to the UN? The question is haunting for those whose analytic antennae tell them that fundamental change is at work even as their deepest convictions tell them that this trend line ought to exist. The fear that convictions are driving analysis, however, is no reason to back away from the latter. One introduces caution, stresses that huge problems remain and can well divert the trend line in negative directions, reconsiders the evidence of where turbulent conditions are leading world politics, digs still deeper for signs that observations are not........
