Why the UN Still Matters: A Conversation With a US Historian and a Canadian
Diplomat

Dulcie Leimbach
• November 4, 2023


In an original video conversation in September for PassBlue, Stephen Schlesinger, right, the US historian who wrote a book about the founding of the United Nations 20 years ago, talks with Bob Rae, Canada’s envoy, about the relevance of the world body today. Despite its defects, Schlesinger says, “My God, where would be without it?”

In early September 2023, right before the annual debate of the United Nations General Assembly opened, Canada’s Ambassador Bob Rae and Stephen Schlesinger, the American historian and author of the book “Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations,” met to talk about the 20th anniversary of Schlesinger’s classic account of the origins of the world institution.

Taking place in Canada’s mission to the UN, near its compound in Midtown Manhattan, Rae and Schlesinger delved into how the UN was formed, in 1945, at the San Francisco conference, and what it means today, amid a world of rising turmoil and flux that is testing the resolve of democracies and their institutions. The 37-minute conversation with Rae and Schlesinger was videotaped for PassBlue by Maria Luisa Gambale, a filmmaker and writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Rae, who led the interview, begins by noting that the founding of the UN 78 years ago was a “deliberate decision” by a group of people intent on forming an organization that remains as relevant now as it did in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Schlesinger, who is also a fellow at the Century Foundation, concurred, touching on the vision by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an internationalist at heart, to create a central entity that joined the countries of the world in a mission of peace while avoiding the “special flaws” of the predecessor League of Nations, which failed to win enough support to survive. Its greatest defect, Schlesinger notes, was that every member had a veto right, making the body “ineffectual.”

Yet the veto right, which now attains only the permanent-five members of the UN Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — can still block action to achieving peace.

Indeed, as the UN, now encompassing 193 members, contends with an increasing number of both explosive and simmering conflicts, Rae and Schlesinger address how the world body remains essential, despite its problems, by providing a crucial historical perspective to the seeming insurmountable challenges faced by the UN.

As Schlesinger, who calls himself an “idealist,” asks, “My God, where would we be without it?”

To which Rae, equally pragmatic, says: “If we didn’t have it, we’d have to invent another one. . . . So we might as well make this one as good as we can make it. That’s the way we approach it.”

— DULCE LEIMBACH