The United Nations at Fifty: Retrospect and Prospect.

AuthorDickens, David

Editor: Ramesh Thakur Published by: Otago University Press and the Peace Research Centre, ANU, Dunedin, 1996, 334pp, $39.95.

The United Nations at Fifty is the edited collection of papers from the 30th Otago Foreign Policy School. Bruce Brown when trying to identify the School's salient themes quotes the American State Department official Marshall Green, who once quipped `Anybody who is not thoroughly confused is just not well informed'. On that note I venture the generalisation that the organising theme of the School was Global Order and the United Nations.

The papers provided by the two Foreign Ministers who attending the School--Don McKinnon and Gareth Evans--are reproduced. Their styles contrast. McKinnon, reviewing New Zealand's involvement with the United Nations, stressed `our pragmatic, principled and practical approach to problems' (which is reflected especially in the papers by serving and former New Zealand officials and army officers), while Evans imaginatively outlined ideas of how to develop co-operative security.

Academic contributions centred around James Rosenau's analysis of how the United Nations should adapt in a turbulent world and John Groom's study of global governance and the United Nations. Perhaps the most perceptive academic contribution was provided by Jacob Bercovitch, who observed that UN mediation, despite the institution's many visible shortcomings and performance shortfalls, `can be part of a graduated and flexible response' whether as an aspect of preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping or peace-building that `entails the minimum of costs'. In other words, the United...

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