For the Allied leaders, the natural question in the wake of victory was thus: "how do we prevent this from happening again?"

It was the general consensus in the marble corridors of both Washington and Whitehall that the pursuit of empire-building was the major contributing factor behind the conflicts with the Nazis in Europe and with the Japanese in Asia. Indeed, it was as a result of this supposition that provisions were to be made that would greatly affect the nature of international relations for the next fifty years.

The first internationally codified anti-imperialist statement from the Allies came through Article III of the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, which served as the basis for the Western Allies’ war aims. It asserted “the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” It was an awkward fact, therefore, that the Union Flag still fluttered over fully one quarter of the earth’s landmass and its peoples, whilst the French Tricolour asserted France’s authority in large swathes of north and western Africa and parts of southeast Asia.

America, by far the most powerful state to emerge from the war, had made clear all along that what was to follow World War II would be a drastic departure from the status quo ante bellum. In an open letter of October 1942 entitled "To the People of England," the editors of Life magazine stated bluntly “one thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British Empire together.” In the same year the American Under-Secretary Sumner Wells proclaimed, “the age of imperialism has ended.”

The new post-imperial age, then, would be one in which nations worked together as equals, as opposed to ruler and ruled, and the security of one would be guaranteed through solidarity with the rest. The institution that embodied the spirit of this new dawn was the United Nations, which officially came into existence on 25 October 1945, and through whom all global disputes were to be mediated and national and human rights protected.

The opening words of the UN Charter read: “We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights…to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends…to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security.” To fulfil this pledge, the UN counted among its institutional armoury a Human Rights Committee, a Decolonisation Committee and, as its most powerful body, a Security Council with the power to “take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

In the immediate post-war climate of 1945, the powers afforded to the United Nations and its emphasis on international cooperation and the primacy of national sovereignty were entirely appropriate. Almost all of the major conflicts of the preceding decades and indeed centuries had been the consequence of national aggression and expansionist tendencies directed by one state towards another. Given the premises under which the Allies had fought the war—as embodied in the Atlantic Charter—imperialism was also no longer a tenable concept. Not only was the UN interested in dismantling existing empires but also in enshrining the rights of states. The UN Charter explicitly upholds the principle of national sovereignty, and by extension, implicitly forbids member states from interfering in the domestic affairs of another state unless that state’s activities constitute a breach of international peace and security.

But in the radically different world of 2007, these safeguards and provisions pose extremely serious problems.

In today's geopolitical climate, some of the greatest threats to international security and human rights come often not from external forces but internal ones, be it in the form of civil war or the persecution of individuals at the hands of their own governments. This is true of Zimbabwe, where the 27-year reign of Robert Mugabe has transformed the "breadbasket of Africa" into an economic and humanitarian disaster area; in Sudan, where the government has actively encouraged civil war and the persecution of its citizens, and in Burma where the military Junta there viciously suppresses any and all opposition, regardless of condemnation from the International Community.

The United Nations therefore, if its founding pledges to protect the peoples of the world and international security are to be taken as more than mere rhetoric, must adapt to meet the challenges of internal conflicts and human rights violations.

But to achieve the difficult balance between national sovereignty and the responsibility to protect human rights, external pressure to uphold the latter at the possible expense of the former must come with the widest possible international mandate, and it is for this reason precisely that the United Nations must take greater responsibility. The highly undesirable alternative is leaving the decision to intervene to one single state and its allies, who may well act more out of self-interest than concern for human rights, and who necessarily lack the international legitimacy that very often makes the intervention sustainable in the long-term.

The most obvious culprit here is the United States, whose policy of unilateralist diplomacy in recent years, evidenced most strikingly in Iraq at present, has led to charges that self-interested policy making have resulted in a decreased respect for human rights, and even of neo-imperialism. But the United States has come to this position largely as a consequence of long held and deeply ingrained scepticism in certain quarters that the United Nations is incapable of adequately addressing the issues about which the US is concerned, combined with a belief that, as the pre-eminent economic and military power on earth, it is capable of solving the world’s problems largely alone.

On one level this is correct. As the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who from 1993 to 1996 served as the American permanent representative to the UN pointed out, the total two-year regular budget of the UN is “roughly what the Pentagon spends every thirty-two hours”. To be precise, the $3.8billion UN budget amounts to roughly 0.13 per cent of the US Federal Budget. Despite this, a capped figure of 22 per cent of the UN budget is provided for by the US. Given the United States’ dominant position on the Security Council, no UN peacekeeping operation can hope to prosper without its approval.

In short, the United Nations needs the United States, and keeping the Americans happy should thus be a pressing reason for UN reform in and of itself. But it is equally true that the US needs the UN. The US’s absolute supremacy in the field of blowing things up is undisputed, but the experience of Iraq and to an extent Afghanistan has shown that it is not so pre-eminent in the area of soft power. Many of the problems the US is at present trying to solve, such as preventing the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, or dealing with the threat of terrorism, cannot be achieved by just one country, even with its particular friends, acting on their own. One needs global institutions to impose legal constraints on nations and to provide legitimisation for action; often quite coercive action. Many Americans understand this very well, after all, they were the ones who set up the United Nations, and there is every reason to believe that the change in administration that will follow the elections in 2008 will herald a government more responsive to the needs of multilateral diplomacy.

But if the United Nations is to meet these challenges it must adapt. One of the leading authorities on the question of UN reform is Lord David Hannay, at present Chair of the UK’s United Nations Association (UNA-UK), having served most recently on the UN High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. Speaking to The Journal, he said: “any international organisation needs to adapt and reform all the time to meet the challenges of a changing world, and changes in the world very much justify reform of the UN.”

Lord Hannay believes that the end of the Cold War signalled the best opportunity yet to remodel the UN, asserting that “it has been possible to change the UN quite a bit, but not in my view enough to deal with a phenomenon of which we see quite a lot, that is to say failed states, nor indeed to deal with the oppression that some states visit on their citizens.”

The biggest single inhibitor in his opinion is “the implicit wording of the Charter; that you can do what you like to your own citizens and no one has the right to interfere.” The 1990s laid bare the deficiencies of the 1945 set-up by way of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda. In the 100 days between 6 April and mid-July some 800,000 were slaughtered at the hands of the Hutu-led government. So too at Srebrenica in July 1995, when more than 7,000 Bosniak males were murdered by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić.

In both instances, the UN was conspicuous only by its absence. It was these instances that led in part to the resolution of the UN World Summit in September 2005 which asserted that the UN had the responsibility to go beyond the strict mandate of the Charter, concluding that if a state was either unable or unwilling to protect its own citizens against grievous international human rights abuses and breaches of international humanitarian law then the international community as a whole had a responsibility to take up the mantle. The doctrine was entitled "The Responsibility to Protect," and to that end two new bodies were established: the Peace Building Commission to assist the victims of state failure, and the Human Rights Council, which replaced the ineffective Human Rights Commission.

However, as is so often the case in the murky world of international diplomacy, these reforms have yet to be effectively implemented, as is evidenced by the ongoing problems in countries such as Sudan, Burma and Zimbabwe. There are two major hindrances. The first revolves around the deficiencies of the UN Security Council, the body charged with executing all actions in this field.

Again a reflection of the 1945 status quo is its five permanent, veto-wielding members: the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China and France and, as Lord Hannay explains, “if there is a disagreement about the way in which such an intervention should take place between the five permanent members, and there is quite often a disagreement on this matter, that can lead to a veto in the Security Council and so you cannot get the authorisation that you need from it for the specific measures you may wish to take.”

Particularly obstructive in this sense are Russia and China. The Chinese especially operate on a foreign policy that is happy to conduct business with rogue regimes regardless of the way they conduct their political affairs. Most strikingly this has been true of Sudan, where China’s willingness to continue business with the government has provided the latter with the necessary funds to bear the weight of international sanctions on the one hand, and made the former reluctant to support the necessary military intervention to bring an end to the suffering for fear of losing trade on the other. Unfortunately, reform of the kind desired by humanitarian interventionists that would remove the power of veto from the permanent members is exceedingly difficult given the fact that these same members could, and almost certainly would veto the very resolution needed to remove it.

The second constraint is of a quite different nature. If the surrounding countries of states in which a humanitarian crisis is unfolding don’t support any action, then the constraints in real terms are very great. According to Lord Hannay, “this problem is very clearly outlined in Zimbabwe, whose neighbours, particularly South Africa, do not support intervention but would rather pursue a diplomatic solution, not effective so far, and perhaps not likely to be effective, but that is their view. And the neighbours of Burma—China, Thailand and India—have taken a similar line on non-interference which has therefore given the Burmese military a kind of free-run.”

Of primary concern to these nations is the refugee problem that inevitably follows military intervention. In the case of Zimbabwe however, the refugee crisis is already acute, and if the Burmese Junta continues to pursue its present line, the same may soon become true there. One cannot disregard the concerns of neighbouring states, since their support is always essential for any intervention, but self-interest must be overcome if such gross human rights abuses are to end, and it is the responsibility of the UN to put greater pressure on these countries to accept that this is the case.

A significant increase in the UN’s paltry budget, so as to make readily available the funds and other resources necessary to deal with refugee fallouts and reconstruction costs would thus be a welcome reform. But in fact, an increased commitment to conflict prevention would not just save lives, it would save money too. According to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the international community could have saved nearly $130billion of the $200billion it spent on managing conflicts in the 1990s by focusing on conflict prevention rather than post-conflict reconstruction.

For any of this to happen, however, requires a fundamental change in attitude to the issue of national sovereignty and human rights.

The incumbent generation have largely failed to address this issue effectively, and the cost in terms of human life has been unacceptable. Only very recently have world leaders begun to come around to the idea that human rights should supersede national sovereignty, but realpolitik has prevented the necessary will to enforce the change, let alone the legal capabilities and obligations to ensure that it happens.

To be sure, there are bodies and conventions in existence whose decrees legally oblige states to cooperate should they be so required. One is the International Criminal Court at The Hague, but this has the power only to extradite and try individuals suspected guilty of committing the crime, not of preventing the crime itself. The Genocide Convention of 1948 exists, yet it has no enforcement provisions. Similarly, the UN’s "Responsibility to Protect" morally obliges nation states to act when human rights are being contravened, but so far it has proved exceedingly difficult to reach agreement on how to enforce this obligation if the state in question resists, or if sovereign nations do not wish to contribute peacekeepers.

The latter decision is at present, entirely voluntary, since the UN has no standing army of its own. The former Secretary General Kofi Annan once described UN peacekeeping as “the only fire brigade in the world that has to acquire a fire engine once the fire has started.” Just such a fire engine has been proposed in the form of a United Nations Emergency Peacekeeping Service (UNEPS), which envisions a 12,000-18,000 strong unit of military personnel, civilian police, legal experts, and relief professionals who are voluntarily employed by the UN to provide rapid assistance as soon as a Security Council resolution gives the authorisation. Many voice concern at such an idea, worrying that larger countries would use the force as leverage against the weaker ones.

The only other alternative would be a provision that legally obliged countries to provide forces for peacekeeping operations should the UN so demand, but this would effectively require nation states to forfeit their sovereign decision when and where to deploy their military personnel. As Lord Hannay concludes, “this would, in my view, be a bridge too far.”

Yet there can be no question that the present situation is several bridges too short. The incumbent generation seems still wed to the somewhat post-colonial notion of national sovereignty as the most cherished thing of all. Perhaps it is up to our generation, the world leaders of tomorrow, to move away from this outdated mindset and towards the belief that our common identity as members of the human race must come before our loyalties to a particular nation state.

In lieu of the fact that such a change cannot come about, let alone be properly enforced, without real international consensus, it is the responsibility of those who make up the United Nations to see that such a change is brought about. We no longer live in 1945. Globalisation should have brought home to everyone the fact that just as we on this earth are better connected with each other than ever before, so too our common responsibility to ensure that we all have equal protection of our human rights, enshrined in international law and regardless of where we live, should be equally evident.