The UN and Bully Politics
Stumbling towards a World Federation in which NO country can veto Peace
Jun 30, 2025
When I was in high school in the early 60s, The United Nations Association of Canada was running a model UN for High School students. There were 70 or 80 high schools in Toronto at the time including public, separate and private, and each school sent a delegation representing a member country of the UN. Each school studied their country and its foreign policy and debated the issues accordingly.
It was a big deal involving several hundred students. We met on Sunday mornings through the school year and developed policies to solve the world’s problem. We tackled the world’s thorniest issues like Nuclear Disarmament, Refugees (there were already 100s of thousands of Palestinian refugees living in camps throughout the Middle East), Human Rights (apartheid in S. Africa was an emerging issue – Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in 1962). These sessions culminated in a weekend plenary session held on the floor of the Ontario Legislature in April when the final drafts of our resolutions were debated and voted on.
And WE solved those problems every year – mostly with common sense with some compromise when appropriate. Our impressions of world affairs changed forever. We could see that ordinary citizens had little say in world affairs and that countries generally behaved like little children in a sandbox throwing sand at each other – the bigger the country the more belligerent and childish their behaviour.
It was eye-opening to study a country in depth to understand its origins and its people, and then to compare that with the public positions taken by that country in the United Nations and other international bodies.
We tackled peace keeping operations in which Canada had played a a pivotal role following the Suez crisis in 1956. Most of us students knew intuitively that the problem was much less about peace keeping as about peace making – but the UN Charter provided no mechanisms to actually stop wars – only to monitor them and pick up the pieces after the ceasefire. Perhaps we were idealistic but we could see the practical weakness in peacekeeping – unarmed soldiers intervening between sides armed to the teeth by the major power bullies. We proposed a permanent highly mobile armed-to-the-teeth force of sufficient size to signify to any belligerent country “Don’t you dare cross that line!” Decisions to mobilize the force would come from the UN – representing a majority of the world’s people. Such actions could be backed if necessary by national armies.
In the past week we saw how that could work when the US stepped in between Israel and Iran and unilaterally declared a ceasefire. The trouble with that was that the US is one of those major power bullies and in that particular case it was one of the instigators of the problem, but it got exasperated when its own machinations were being ignored.
And that’s been the pattern ever since the founding of the UN – When one of those bullies gets tired of the mess they’ve created, they drop the hammer. That doesn’t solve the bigger issues when animosity breaks out between those bullies.
The UN is now 80 years old and throughout those 80 years the same problems have been discussed and studied by thousands of bodies with conclusions not appreciably different from those of a group of Toronto high school students 65 years ago. The need has never been in dispute – a UN (or something replacing it) in which no country can veto peace.
While involved with the model UN way back then I made contact with a related organization – The World Federalist Movement which advocated for a World Federal government, similar to the UN but with real powers to tackle problems between countries and to stop wars before they start. World Federalists and similar organizations exist in many countries. Collectively they have generated a massive volume of both academic and practical studies on the subject. Here on Substack you can find One World Digest which a brief daily summary of actions of UN & other international organizations.
Canadians know how federalism works – we have provinces that disagree and some even threaten separation but on the whole we move forward with a remarkable degree of unity. World federation would be similar.
If you google UN reform you get pages of proposals on how to accomplish it. Perhaps the most complete proposal is from the Global Governance Forum which has drafted a whole new UN charter. It’s most exciting proposal is a constituent assembly elected worldwide by real people. This Assembly and a somewhat modified General Assembly could act together to overrule a Security Council veto. That should be a no-brainer – that a majority of the world’s countries plus a majority of its people could overrule the single vote of one of those major power bullies
The UN itself is embracing reform – the “UN80 Initiative, unveiled in March by Secretary-General António Guterres, is a system-wide push to streamline operations, sharpen impact, and reaffirm the UN’s relevance for a rapidly changing world.initiative.”
And there is another initiative under development by the World Federalist Movement of Canada, to generate international support for a resolution to the General Assembly to ask the International Court of Justice to rule on limiting the use of the veto by nations who are participants in a dispute. That sounds a bit convoluted but if it works and such vetoes stop, it would be a game changer. Any rational look at such vetoes would suggest that they are at best inappropriate and yet they have been standard procedure for years by both Russia and the United States.
Grenville Clark was a great internationalist who advised Roosevelt during World War II and wrote extensively about the need for a strong UN and mourned its weaknesses even as it was being formed.
In 1945, before the UN Charter entered into force, Clark, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts, former New Hampshire Governor Robert P. Bass, and more than forty others held a conference in Dublin, New Hampshire. There they created the “Dublin Declaration”, which judged the new UN Charter inadequate to preserve peace and proposed a transformation of the U.N. General Assembly into a world legislature. This was one of the foundational documents of the World Federalist Movement. It stated, “Such a government should be based upon a constitution under which all peoples and nations will participate upon a basis of balanced representation” and it called for “limited but definite and adequate power for the prevention of war.”[
If the founders of the United Nations had implemented these ideas back then, the history of the last 80 years would have been vastly different.
