The Parliament of Man is the first definitive history of the United Nations, from one of America's greatest living historians.Distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy, author of the bestselling The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, gives us a thorough and timely account that explains the UN's roots and functions while also casting an objective eye on its effectiveness and its prospects for success in meeting the challenges that lie ahead. Kennedy shows the UN for what it is: fallible, human-based, often dependent on the whims of powerful national governments or the foibles of individual administrators—yet also utterly indispensable. With his insightful grasp of six decades of global history, Kennedy convincingly argues that "it is difficult to imagine how much more riven and ruinous our world of six billion people would be if there had been no UN."
Author(s): Paul Kennedy
Edition: 1
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2006
Language: English
City: New York
A Note on the Title xi
Preface «ii
PART 1 The Origins
CHAPTER 1 The Troubled Advance to a New World Order, 1815-1945 3
PART 2 The Evolution of the Many UNs Since 1945
CHAPTER 2 The Conundrum of the Security Council 31
CHAPTER 3 Peacekeeping and Warmaking 77
CHAPTER 4 Economic Agendas, North and South 113
CHAPTER 5 The Softer Face of the UN's Mission 143
CHAPTER 6 Advancing International Human Rights 177
CHAPTER 7 "We the Peoples": Democracy, Governments, and
Nongovernmental Actors 206
PART 3 The Present and the Future
CHAPTER 8 The Promise and the Peril of the Twenty-first Century 243
Afterword 281
Acknowledgments 291
Notes 295
Appendix: Charter of the United Nations 313
Index
