International Institutions

The headquarters of the An intergovernmental organization founded in 1945 to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, and promote social progress. The UN replaced the failed League of Nations and currently has 193 member states. Its principal organs include the General Assembly, the Security Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat. sits on eighteen acres of land along the East River in New York City. The site was a slaughterhouse district before John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated $8.5 million to purchase it in 1946. The land is technically international territory, not part of the United States. It has its own fire department. Mail sent from the building carries UN postage stamps, not American ones.

These details are not trivial. They reflect a genuinely strange idea: that sovereign nations, each jealously guarding its independence, might voluntarily submit to shared rules enforced by shared institutions on shared ground. That nations which had just spent six years slaughtering one another's citizens by the tens of millions might sit across a table and talk.

The twentieth century's great experiment in international governance grew from the wreckage of its worst catastrophes. The institutions that emerged, the UN, the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and dozens of others, represent the most ambitious attempt in human history to govern a connected world. They have prevented some wars, failed to prevent others, eradicated diseases, entrenched inequalities, fed millions, and frustrated billions. Their story is not one of triumph or failure. It is something more complicated, and more interesting, than either.