The United Nations presided over one of the great achievements of this century decolonization. It has promoted the spread of human rights norms and machinery. It is still the symbol of our hopes and dreams for a better world, one in which weakness can be compensated by justice and fairness, where the law of the jungle can be replaced by the rule of law.

If the United Nations did not exist, would we invent it? The UN Charter was signed in San Francisco on June 26, 1945. Today international organizations, with the United Nations at their core, touch our daily lives in many ways.

Had the UN founders been told that their creation would still be intact at the dawn of the new millennium, embracing virtually the entire international community, they would have felt pride and satisfaction. Yet their vision of a world community equal in rights and united in action is still to be realized.

The United Nations presided over one of the great achievements of this century decolonization. It has promoted the spread of human rights norms and machinery. It is still the symbol of our hopes and dreams for a better world, one in which weakness can be compensated by justice and fairness, where the law of the jungle can be replaced by the rule of law.

But the organization has not lived up to expectations in securing a more peaceful world. Its financial difficulties are compounded by perceptions, often unjustified, of bureaucratic inefficiency. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have displaced the United Nations as the center of gravity of economic development and international financial management.

For cynics, the United Nations exists so that nations that are unable to do anything individually can get together to decide that nothing can be done collectively. The price of inaction on a grand scale is paid by the peoples of Bosnia, Rwanda and others.

Yet its greatest strength is clear: It is the only universal forum for global cooperation and management. The global public goods of peace, prosperity, sustainable development and good governance cannot be achieved by any single country acting on its own.

For the United Nations to succeed, the world community must match the demands made on it by the means given to it. The organization has to strike a balance between realism and idealism. It will be incapacitated if it alienates its most important members, in particular the United States. UN decisions must reflect current realities of military and economic power. But the organization also risks losing all credibility if it compromises core values. Kosovo captures the tension. Critics assert that NATO unilateralism was a powerful threat to the prospects of a rules-based world order centered on the UN. By retroactively legitimizing NATO aggression, they argue, the UN has been subverted from a coalition to protect the weak into one to serve big power interests.

But NATO's military action against Serbia symbolized an emerging order that juggles geopolitical realism with idealism. Allowing the regime of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, to flout the core ideals of the UN would have eroded its legitimacy.

The fact that NATO sought and received UN Security Council endorsement, and with it the cloak of retroactive legitimacy, is an indication that many supporters of the air strikes had remained troubled with the precedent of collective military action outside the UN framework. A UN blessing is indispensable even for the most powerful military coalition in history.

The United Nations represents the idea that unbridled nationalism and the raw interplay of power must be moderated in a wider framework. It is the center for harmonizing national interests and forging the international interest.

The Kosovo learning curve shows that the UN ideal can neither be fully attained nor abandoned. Like other international organizations, the United Nations is condemned to be caught in an eternal credibility gap between aspiration and performance.

The writer, vice rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo, contributed this personal comment to the International Herald Tribune. Credit: International Herald Tribune

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