The Failure of the So-Called United Nations

The United Nations emerged in 1945 from the conviction that the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century could not be prevented merely through a balance of power, but required a legally bound international order. This hope drew on ideas developed by Immanuel Kant, who in Perpetual Peace (1795) argued that a federation of states, governed by shared rules and republican constitutions, could make lasting peace possible. In the twentieth century, this line of thought was further developed in liberal institutionalism. Authors such as Robert Keohane argued in After Hegemony (1984) that international institutions could stabilize cooperation even in the absence of a world government by making expectations reliable, creating transparency, and rendering rule violations visible.

The United Nations in its present form stand as evidence of the failure of these lofty aspirations.

Conceived after 1945 as the practical political successor to the League of Nations and the embodiment of such ideas, they now appear as proof that Kant and Keohane were wrong.

The universal claim to collective security, the protection of human rights, and the peaceful settlement of disputes cannot be realized in a global society shaped by lies, falsehoods, and at times hatred. In my view, this has always been the case—and I say this consciously as a historian and a European.

The failure of the so-called United Nations.

Realism, by contrast, is analytically more restrained than I am personally. It does not claim that cooperation is impossible. It merely acknowledges—quite realistically, in the literal sense—the realities of power. We are simply not all equal. I realize that theorists refer to states and governments, but it is equally clear that these consist of people and that it is therefore people who are behind decisions and developments.

To assert that institutions possess an autonomous, structure-transforming force seems, in a world like ours, almost naïve—much like the efforts of the UN Human Rights Council. The body was originally intended to monitor universal standards. The problem, however, lies with the individuals who occupy it. They are not transformed into better, less hate-driven people by some supposedly inherent structural force of the institution. They interpret resolutions, investigations, and mandates politically—and they act accordingly.

The controversies surrounding Francesca Albanese provide a striking example. Her mandate as Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories obliges her to assess potential violations of international law. Yet her recurring formulations and argumentative patterns in public statements reveal her as a political actor who is not reshaped by the institution she represents.

In recent days, several governments, including the German (finally!), have sharply rejected her statements and questioned her suitability for office. Here, the structural problem of the United Nations becomes visible as if under a magnifying glass: when individuals who fundamentally reject the impartiality required by their mandate are able to operate in public office as they please, the institution loses authority. The liberal assumption that expertise can operate above political battle lines clearly reaches its limits. In this particular case, even the claimed expertise is open to serious doubt. As I reported in my newsletter in the summer of 2025, she is not even a licensed attorney.

It does not surprise me that the institution fails so completely in this regard. Institutions evidently remain arenas. The claim to enforce universal norms collides with the logic of power-driven individuals who do not relinquish interpretative authority but seek to expand it within these very structures. The liberal expectation that institutions could transform or overcome power-seeking individuals simply does not hold.

Realism does not claim moral superiority here, but rather offers a description of what can be empirically observed. Against this backdrop, it is not realism that appears deficient, but rather the original institutional hope—a child of a bygone era. The United Nations embody a normative project that was politically attractive—after the Second World War. The concept, however, has proven unsustainable. Evidently, its architects failed to account for human nature.