When I was an undergrad at Drew University, I got the chance to study at the UN for a semester in the fall of 1983. This consisted of piling into a bus every Tuesday and Thursday morning for trip to New York where we had class in a basement conference room across the street from the UN building. Each day we had two speakers from either the UN Secretariat or some nation's delegation to the UN. Though the experience is now 30 years in the past, I thought I would share my takeaways from it.
The UN is not a world government: We heard this from practically every member of the UN staff and many of the country delegations. One got the distinct impression that these folks were weary of criticisms of the UN's inability to govern the world and impose decision on nations. The standard argument was that the UN was set up to help nations cooperate and coordinate actions and this presupposed that nations wanted to do so. The fact that many nations (such as the US and Soviet Union) did not, was an unfortunate reality that the UN was never intended to overcome.
About a decade later, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait provided an example of the kind of situation the UN was intended to handle. Iraq's invasion almost perfectly fit the UN Charter's definition of aggression and there was a consensus among the leading powers that it was illegitimate. This allowed the Security Council to pass a number of resolutions condemning Iraq and authorizing the use of force. This is turn facilitated the building of a large coalition that included many nations such as Syria that might otherwise not have been on board with an entirely US led effort.
If we didn't have a UN, we would need to create one: This was the second most common comment from UN staff. The argument here was that the UN provided an indispensable means of communication and contact between nations. It was often pointed out that not every nation could afford to have an embassy in every other nation in the world. Many relied on their delegation to the UN to conduct direct diplomacy with other nations. Also, the UN provided a means of contact between adversarial nations that could not have direct contact for political reasons. Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (which had oberserver status) was one common example.
Most of the important work at the UN goes on behind closed doors: Supposedly, the Security Council has a separate chamber for private discussions in which the "real" diplomacy is conducted prior to going into the official chamber to make public declarations. Whether or not this is technically true, we heard time and again that a government's actual position on an issue often differs from what they say in public and how they vote in the General Assembly or Security Council. Also, many off-the-record bilateral contacts are made between delegations from individual countries.
One of the things I repeatedly heard from my professors is that nations do not conduct their more sensitive negotiations and diplomacy with other nations in public. This was reinforced by the fact that all our guest speakers spoke to us under the condition of non-attribution and we were reminded of this before and after each presentation. Indeed, after this experience, every classified briefing and class I got in the Army was a major disappointment.
One example that comes to mind is Turkey's annexation on Northern Cyprus, which it was then occupying. We heard about this in our class at least a month before it happened. Obviously, Turkey had floated the news in order to gauge the reaction of the international community. Officially, almost every nation condemned it as a violation of international law. Unofficially, it was viewed by many as an action that solved more problems than it created. The back channel communications allowed Turkey to avoid surprising nations by its annexation and to get some feedback before committing itself.
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