Think As Historian: THINK AS A HISTORIAN: COMPARE TWO ARGUMENTS ON THE UNITED NATIONS
Is the United Nations still relevant? That was the question posed in 2006 by the University of Pennsylvania Law Review as part of its Debate series. Two law professors participated in the written debate. Excerpts from their conflicting answers to that question appear below.
Read the following two statements on the United Nations. Explain in your own words the gist of each one. Then compare the arguments and write a few sentences summarizing the differences between them.
“The UN offers . . . the possibility for wide, and sometimes even
universal, participation in the creation of the legal rules that regulate
international affairs. Every state is represented at the UN and can
be included in the processes of international lawmaking. While
it is true that bilateral or regional agreements may result in deeper
levels of commitment—greater synergies of interests are likely to
be found amongst smaller numbers of states—the challenges and
dangers the global community faces today demand the near universal
participation in legal regimes made most possible through the UN.
Whether international law seeks to regulate the Internet, respond to
global warming, combat international terrorism, or address pandemic
diseases, the exclusion or defection of only a small number of states
may well render the broader enterprise of legalization worthless.
A handful of serious polluters, a few safe havens for terrorists, or
even one epicenter of disease outbreak may well undermine an
otherwise global legal regime. The UN, with its broad reach, its all-
encompassing membership, and its agenda-setting potential may well
be the best (and perhaps the only) hope for developing universal legal
regimes that can effectively respond to these new challenges.”
William Burke-White, University of Pennsylvania
Law School
“Professor Burke-White points to various global problems—WMD [weapons of mass destruction] proliferation, terrorism, infectious disease, and the like. He does not claim that perfect solutions may be found for these problems . . . He argues only that no international institution can take certain kinds of lawmaking steps regarding these issues better than the UN. He shows that the UN has taken many such lawmaking steps and that proponents hope that such steps will lead to reducing the net harm produced by these problems. He thus concludes that the UN is “urgently needed.” Nowhere does he actually demonstrate that these lawmaking steps actually reduce the net harm produced by the problems. Indeed, if one looks at the actual examples cited by Professor Burke-White, it seems clear that the UN has not had a positive effect at all.
“Despite an impressive outpouring of words, the UN has done little effectively to address the problems mentioned by Professor Burke- White—like terrorism prevention, global climate change, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—and in some ways has even exacerbated them. The UN has done nothing to prevent North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons, and it seems highly unlikely that the UN will do anything effective to prevent Iran from completing its plans to obtain such weapons. The UN has played a useful role in collecting some kinds of information about Al Qaeda, but has actually undermined other antiterror efforts.”
Abraham Bell, Lecturer, Bar-Ilan University Faculty
of Law and Visiting Professor, Fordham Law School