Alison Broinowski, 'The Third Try', forthcoming

Dr Alison Broinowski, Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Asian Societies and Histories, writes:

My new book, co-authored with James Wilkinson, a former Ambassador of the US to the UN, is The Third Try: Can the UN Work? The subtitle may change but it will be published by Scribe in October in time for the UN's 60th birthday. In it we consider the high hopes and even higher falutin rhetoric of the UN's previous anniversaries and ask what it has done to fulfil the purposes set for it in the Charter: to rid the world of war, to protect human rights, and to improve conditions of life 'in larger freedom'.

The US, that had to take the USSR along like a mother in law on the honeymoon, fell out of love with its creation before the honemoon was over, in spite of agreeing to pay almost a quarter of the UN's costs, and even though it had set the UN up in New York's Turtle Bay on land donated by John D.Rockefeller. Successive Republican administrations have been particularly hostile to the UN, as newly independent nations demanded the rich countries honour the Charter's pledges, as international courts and tribunals were set up that threatened the supremacy of US law, and lately, as the Security Council refused legitimacy to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

There are, of course, as many other views of the UN as there are member states - the original 51 having grown to 191. The larger Europeans tend to regard it pragmatically as one among several multilateral tools with which they can fashion a world that suits their interests. The Nordics use it to deliver their aid contributions - the largest per capita in the world - and thus buy considerable influence. The 'poor' world uses it to get aid and demand political concessions from Western member states which are often divided in their response. The veto-weilding permanent members of the Security Council - the victors of World War II, plus China - guard their power against Japan, Germany, India, and others that claim they deserve to share it. Recent recommendations for reform may achieve some overdue changes, but no member state puts the interests of the world body ahead of its own.

The League of Nations was the world's first try to secure peace, and the UN was the second, both of them born after world wars. Our title asks whether in the 21st century its third try can succeed in reducing conflict without agreement having to be forged by another major conflagration. None of the proposed alternative world orders has enough feathers to fly with. The UN, for all its faults and failures, can claim to have prevented World War III: but small, nasty wars have by no means been eliminated. Nor has arms control been agreed to or nuclear proliferation achieved. Genocide has gone unpunsihed in several states. Poverty still affects two thirds of the world's people, and their human rights are those most often violated.

The UN's third try depends on the will of its members to reform what needs changing and make the Charter work as it should. It will be judged by the progress it makes towards the Millennium Development Goals, that have set achievable targets for health, children's literacy, the status of women, economic development, and the environment by 2015. The rich members demand improvements in governance and human rights in poor countries as the price of all this, while the poor urge debt forgiveness and delivery of promised support. We assess the chances of a meeting of minds before it's too late.

Co-writing THE THIRD TRY with a American has been a good way to assess who's most at fault for the UN's failures. At the outset, I was inclined to heap the blame on the Bush administration for its double standards on human rights, the rule of law, torture, the Geneva Conventions, and disarmament, and its claim of a hegemonic right to do as it wishes and let the UN pick up the pieces. My co-author didn't always agree, saying other rich countries let the US do the dirty work from which they benefited without taking the blame, and billionaire leaders of poor countries were as much at fault for their plight as the donor agencies that watched them divert 80 per cent of aid from its purpose. Now, watching Australian policy and public comment increasingly conform to the US line, I have come round to the view that we, as much as the US, will have to decide whether we go further down the dangerous, unilateralist track, or whether we work with others, particularly in Asian countries, to make multilateralism work.