United Nations Resolve

This week I was wished Happy UN Day by many colleagues. Some navel gazing about the day follows.

The United Nations officially came into existence on 24 October 1945.

In 1948, the General Assembly declared 24 October to be "devoted to making known to the people of the world the aims and achievements of the United Nations and to gaining their support for" its work. In 1971, the same body adopted Resolution 2782 declaring that United Nations Day shall be an international observance or international holiday and recommended that it should be observed as a public holiday by United Nations member states.

It may seem a bit introspective and self serving for an institution to go about declaring its own day (twice). Of course it was not the UN secretariat that took these decisions. It was the Member States. This begs the question, given Member States took this 1971 resolution with the above recommendation, how many countries have followed up their own resolved recommendation and actually observe it as a public holiday? I am tempted to guess the answer is zero. The UN Secretariat does not even include UN day in our list of 10 annual holidays (so we also ignore the recommendation it seems). If someone knows of a country that celebrates UN Day as a public holiday please post it in a comment on this blog. Of course setting holidays is hardly a world altering issue. It doesn't really matter if countries celebrate this day or not. But why resolve this if it doesn't really matter or if you have no intention of following through with your own recommendation, or both?

This underscores a real difficulty with recommendations in UN resolutions in general. Member states declare their mutual resolve in various venues, including the General Assembly, but the resolve too often ends in the UN chamber, and fails to result in sufficient action on the ground. How to improve the efficacy? Fewer resolution creating bodies and fewer resolutions in each of them would perhaps be a good start. Perhaps consider eschewing recommendation paragraphs altogether, and restrict the operative text of resolutions to statements of agreed mutual action. Some other document called a "Recommendation' could be adopted rather than 'resolution' for those.  Maybe pass a resolution to take fewer, more meaningful resolutions? LOL.

Happy UN Day everyone.

The China Lover by Ian Buruma
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The wonderful thing about this book is the intricate and erudite knowledge of the period. The knowledge and opinion of the author comes out strongly in each of the three protagonists. Indeed, because of this, they all sound the same in the end. The fact that they are all interested in frequent meaningless sex and not romantic relationships is another common feature. The author's commentary on Japanese society and recent history spoken through these three characters is interesting and illuminating. This said, as either a fictionalized quasi-biography of Yamaguchi, or a novel, both of which it the book seems to wish to be, it does not really work. I gained little insight into Yamaguchi, other than some trivial things like where she was located and what she was employed doing at various phases in her life, and that the author feels she was a bit vapid, but attractive, ambitious and lucky. Calling this a novel is the real problem. The three segments don't fit together at all. There are some tantalizing possible connecting threads but they fizzle out in strange ways (sato san, the 'I' from part one reappearing in part 2 only to be eaten by a dog immediately, Vandoever the 'I' from part two reappearing in part three, only to be strangely nonexistent in Yamaguchi's memory). Towards the end it gets quite tedious to read, as by then you are aware that it is not a novel. That the stories and insights, do not link together, and just sort of peter out rather than ending in a way to leave the reader with any kind of overall insight or question.


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