Prof. Jeffrey Sachs spoke at an event sponsored by Vision China and China Daily on the 80th Anniversary of the UN, and on the Global Governance Initiative (GGI) introduced by President Xi Jinping at the Sept. 1 SCO summit in Tianjin, China. Sachs began by noting that the term “united nations” was used before the end of World War II to refer to the four major powers: U.S., Soviet Union, China and the U.K. Franklin Roosevelt formulated the UN on the basis that these major powers would cooperate to secure the peace, but as soon as FDR died in April 1945, the idea of cooperation was dropped and the division of the world into blocs was initiated in the Cold War, with the “extreme ideology” of the U.S. and the U.K. ruling out any idea of cooperation with the U.S.S.R. and China. “The UN was never allowed to function on the basis of great power cooperation,” Sachs asserted, only to maintain Western privilege.
A major problem, still today, is that “development” was not a part of the basic structure. Also, it was assumed that it would be run by the West, primarily the U.S. But the West is now only 10% of the world’s population. “I love the United Nations,” he said, “but it doesn’t work!” We must make it work, he said, as the only means to prevent nuclear war, to end the mindless conflicts, to prevent environmental destruction.
