?The great force on which we must rely is the hatred of the cruelty and waste of war which now exists. As soon as the war is over the process of oblivion sets in...,? Lord Robert Cecil wrote as the war drew to an end. ?It is only, therefore, while the recollection of all we have been through is burning fresh that we can hope to overcome the inevitable opposition and establish...a new and better organization of the nations of the world.?

Cecil, a member of Britain?s Imperial War Cabinet, wrote that at the end of the First World War, and the organization he hoped could prevent another such war was the League of Nations. It failed and so we got the Second World War. By the end of that one, nuclear weapons were being dropped on cities ? so the victors had no choice but to clone the League, making some significant improvements, and try again. Sixty years ago, the Charter of the United Nations was signed by 50 nations in San Francisco.

There was not a single idealist among the men and women who signed the Charter. They were badly frightened people who had lived through the worst war in history and who feared that an even worse one lay in wait. Six decades later, how is their organization doing?

Still popular

Two things cannot be denied: the UN has already survived three times longer than its ill-starred predecessor, and the great war it was meant to prevent has not happened. In the various crises that might have ended with the superpowers sliding into a nuclear war, the UN security council was an essential forum for negotiations, and the Charter provided a new kind of international law that the rivals could defer to without losing face when they wanted to back away from the crisis.

So why is the UN so widely disdained today? One reason is that Lord Robert Cecil was right: ?the process of oblivion sets in? quickly, and later generations cannot remember why it was so important to create an organization to prevent further wars. Besides, the UN isn?t all that widely disdained.

It gets a bad press in the US, but that is mainly because it acts as a brake on the untrammelled exercise of American military power. It?s still quite popular in most of the world, although it continues to annoy nationalists in all the great powers. At the other extreme, it frustrates all the idealists who want it to be about justice and democracy and maybe even brotherly love.

Time to change

It?s not. As Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican senator and ambassador to the UN, said in 1955: ?This organization is created to keep you from going to Hell. It isn?t created to take you to Heaven.? For all the fine words of the Charter, the UN is still mainly about preventing another major war between the great powers.

Does the UN need to be ?reformed?? Certainly. It has acquired some bad habits, and its structures have not kept up with the realities of a changing world. The current main focus of reformers is on the security council, whose permanent, veto-wielding members are still the five victorious great powers of 1945. Three-quarters of the countries that now comprise the UN were not even independent then, so clearly some adjustment is overdue.

The UN is an attempt to change the way that international politics works, because the only alternative was to accept perpetual war, and by 1945 that was no longer an option. But not even the optimists imagined that it could succeed in less than a century or so. Sixty years on, it may not yet be even halfway to its goal. As its most influential secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, used to say: ?None of us are ever going to see the world order we dream of appear in our lifetime. Nevertheless, the effort to build that order is the difference between anarchy and a tolerable degree of chaos.?