Right, that would be the kind of “collective action” that I mentioned… it doesn’t have anything to do with preventing nations from going to war with each other… the UN doesn’t have that kind of authority and never did.
I was taking issue with the statement “the UN was not intended to override the sovereignty of member nations” considering that in many respects UN convention certainly overrides national sovereignty. At least for smaller states that can be coerced as such
But even then, the idea that the UN was not intended to prevent wars is also false. That was basically the entire point of creating an international body before human rights and other focuses were ever in the conversation.
The League of Nations was invented as a result of WWI and the treaty of Versailles in the interest of preventing another world war. The precursor to that was the 1899 International Peace Conference “held in The Hague to elaborate instruments for settling crises peacefully, preventing wars and codifying rules of warfare”
The whole, at least original, point of international governance is specifically to prevent conflict.
The goals for the UN as outlined at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference make that pretty clear, as peace are literally the first two aims of the organization:
The stated purposes of the proposed international organization were:
To maintain international peace and security; and to that end to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace and the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means adjustment or settlement of international disputes which may lead to a breach of the peace;
To develop friendly relations among nations and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
To achieve international co-operation in the solution of international economic, social and other humanitarian problems; and
To afford a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the achievement of these common ends.
Right, that would be the kind of “collective action” that I mentioned… it doesn’t have anything to do with preventing nations from going to war with each other… the UN doesn’t have that kind of authority and never did.
I was taking issue with the statement “the UN was not intended to override the sovereignty of member nations” considering that in many respects UN convention certainly overrides national sovereignty. At least for smaller states that can be coerced as such
But even then, the idea that the UN was not intended to prevent wars is also false. That was basically the entire point of creating an international body before human rights and other focuses were ever in the conversation.
The League of Nations was invented as a result of WWI and the treaty of Versailles in the interest of preventing another world war. The precursor to that was the 1899 International Peace Conference “held in The Hague to elaborate instruments for settling crises peacefully, preventing wars and codifying rules of warfare”
The whole, at least original, point of international governance is specifically to prevent conflict.
The goals for the UN as outlined at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference make that pretty clear, as peace are literally the first two aims of the organization: