In today’s world, a threat to one is a threat to all, the panel concluded. Its report set out a vision of collective security for the future—taking into account the existence of new and evolving dangers that could not have been anticipated when the UN was founded in 1945. The report listed the following six clusters of threats with which the world must contend in the decades ahead:

• War between states;
• Violence within states, including civil wars, large-scale human rights abuses and genocide;
• Poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation;
• Nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons;
• Terrorism;
• Transnational organized crime.

Strategies for overcoming these dire eventualities were spelled out, with the conclusion that they will take considerable resources, long-term commitments and, most of all, leadership.

As world crises beset the early years of the twenty-first century, the Corporation continues to provide support to make UN activities effective, and always does so in response to the UN’s request. With that in mind, a pivotal program assisting the development of the United Nations’ Peacebuilding Commission is receiving funding from the Corporation for two years, beginning in April 2006. The International Peace Academy and the Center for International Cooperation at New York University have worked for several years on issues related to peacebuilding, the process of post-conflict reconstruction that strives to reduce the risk that a state will relapse into renewed violence. Their current project, which will address a number of the most significant threats specified by the high-level panel, is a joint effort to provide analytical and policy support to stakeholders in the new peacebuilding institutions at the UN during the critical start-up phase.

The UN, because of its fruitful, longstanding relationship with these two organizations, asked the Corporation to work with them. The goals for this project are: 1) to help senior UN personnel identify peacebuilding capacities and gaps within the UN system; 2) to contribute substantial peacebuilding analysis and advice for long-term application, based on verifiable research from the field; and 3) to incorporate the views and voices of national and UN participants to assure that reform efforts reflect realities on the ground.

In an age plagued by nuclear weapons, threatened by the possibility of biological and chemical warfare, subject to terrorism and other unspeakable dangers, there is undoubtedly much work ahead for the United Nations and the organizations and individuals who support its core values of finding ways to advance world peace and security. And these efforts must be carried out collectively; the work of peacemaking must be shouldered by all nations and leaders. As the final report of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict states, “The prevention of deadly conflict is, over the long term, too hard—intellectually, technically and politically—to be the responsibility of any single institution or government, no matter how powerful. Strengths must be pooled, burdens shared and labor divided among actors. This is a practical necessity.”

The UN undeniably has numerous problems and sometimes falls short of the various expectations of its members, supporters and those who look to it for help but, as Vartan Gregorian has noted, “It remains the only world organization we have. If it did not exist we would have to create it, because humanity needs a collective moral authority to avert war, build understanding and meet urgent needs. As long as the United Nations is the only world body that continues to provide both a forum and a venue to discuss, debate and resolve final solutions to ongoing as well as new challenges to humanity in the realm of war, famine, national disaster and international violation of human rights, the Corporation, when appropriate, will continue to help support some of the institution’s peace efforts.”

In the words of Andrew Carnegie, “Peace wins her way not by force; her appeal is to the reason and the conscience of man.” It was to appeal to our reason and conscience that the United Nations was created, and its continued existence is our best, perhaps our only, hope for peace.

A Wider View: Awareness, Interaction and Aid

In looking back at 60 years of Carnegie Corporation involvement with the UN, it is a source of great pride to have been active in policymaking, reform and support for various commissions and dissemination measures designed to promote security and peace as well as human rights and justice. This this report has dealt mainly with conflict and cooperation issues. But in response to the secretary general, Carnegie Corporation has also, along with other foundations, provided support for projects in the economic, social and intellectual realm, as well as in other areas. Corporation grants have funded major strategic initiatives, and they have also targeted individual United Nations projects designed to respond to specific needs. A number of such efforts are described here.

While the ideas the UN has produced are arguably its most important products, “the UN’s attentive publics, both supportive and skeptical, are probably unaware of the economic and social aspects of the UN’s contribution to world peace and progress,” according to Vartan Gregorian. To bridge this knowledge gap, in 1999 the Corporation funded the United Nations Intellectual History Project (UNIHP). The Corporation’s undertaking of this project at the request of Secretary-General Kofi Annan set an example other supporters apparently felt compelled to follow, among them the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, Norway, Switzerland and the Republic and Canton of Geneva as well as the Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, Dag Hammarskjöld and UN foundations.

Based in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, this independent research effort, which has received Corporation grants of $660,000, is producing a collection of oral histories and a series of scholarly books by world-class experts (eight volumes have been released to date) with the goal of building public awareness of the role of the UN as the creator and nurturer of world-changing ideas. Important concepts from the project’s publications are also found in The Power of UN Ideas: Lessons from the First 60 Years, which was distributed widely to members of the U.S. Congress and others, and was UNIHP’s contribution to the debate about UN reform surrounding the high-level panel mentioned earlier. The project’s research products and dissemination have catalyzed other such efforts to document UN history—for example, by the United Nations Development Program and UNESCO.

The timing of this scholarship has been crucial, since many of the key participants were still alive at the time of its writing to contribute to the extensive oral history (ten have since died). In 2005, Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, Louis Emmerij and Richard Jolly published UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice, the project’s book based on in-depth interviews with 73 people who played major roles in the development of UN ideas. The complete transcripts will be available on CD-ROM in 2007 for distribution to libraries worldwide. Aimed at inspiring new approaches to international collaboration, the ongoing project covers such areas as trade and finance, the role of women and gender, poverty elimination, human rights and responses to international economic crises. According to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the key objective of the project is to “provide a firmer historical basis for current discussions of the need for a better institutional architecture of the management of global economic relations.”

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