The United Nations Organization (UNO) officially came into existence in October 1945 after the Second World War. It was formed to replace the League of Nations, which had proved incapable of restraining aggressive dictators like Hitler and Mussolini. In setting up the UNO, the great powers tried to eliminate some of the weaknesses, which had handicapped the league. The UN charter was drawn up in San Francisco in 1945, and was based on proposals made at an earlier meeting between the USSR USA China and Britain held at Dumbarton Oaks (USA) in 1944
The aims of the UN are to
• Preserve peace and eliminate war
• Remove cause of conflict by encouraging economic social educational scientific and cultural progress throughout the world
The western nations could no longer have things go in their own way and they began to criticize the Third World blocs for being too “political”, by this they meant, “acting in a way the west disapproved of”. For example in 1974 UNESCO passed a resolution condemning “colonialism” and “imperialism”. In 1979 when the western blocs introduced a General Assembly motion condemning terrorism, the Arabs states and their supporters defeated it.
Fiction reached crisis point in 1983 at the UNESCO General Congress. Many Western nations including the USA, accused the UNESCO of being inefficient and wasteful and of having unacceptable political aims. What bought matter to a head was a proposal by some communist state for internal incensing of foreign journalists. According to the US, this would lead to a situation in which member states could exercise a effective censorship of each other’s media organization. Consequently the Americans announced that they would withdraw from the UNESCO on 1st January 1985, since it had become “hostile to the basic institutions and a free press”. Britain and Singapore withdrew in 1986 for similar reasons.
There is a wastage of effort and resources among the agencies
The agencies sometimes seem to duplicate each other’s work. Critics claim that the WHO and the FAO overlap too much. The FAO was criticized in 1984 for spending too much money