Transcript
GENERAL BRENT SCOWCROFT: The report begins by pointing out, as Ivo said, how much different the world is today than it was when the U.N. was founded. When it was founded, it had 51 members and they were relatively similar states. This was before decolonization, and much of the world was still in colonial status. So there were states having a similar outlook, similar makeup, similar problems, and so on, and who viewed security largely in terms of interstate conflict. The Security Council was designed to represent power in the world—some geographical distribution, but primarily power in the world. And it did—power in the world in 1945, minus the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan.
Now the U.N. has gone from 51 members to 191 members and from a relatively homogenous outlook on the problems of the world to an extremely diverse outlook. The threats have moved from primarily interstate conflict to internal conflict, and for many of these new states the security threat is that of its very existence—problems of poverty, problems of disease, problems of environment. These are, for much of this new world, security threats, not just natural everyday threats. So it is a very different kind of a world and the U.N. is not fully reflective of that world.
In addition, the nature of the world today, responding as it has to the fact of globalization, is such that many of the problems facing the world—security and otherwise—require cooperation. They're no longer able to be handled by the nation state itself. And so that puts an additional burden on the U.N.
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