International Organizations: Why the UN Has No Army
From river commissions and the League of Nations to the UN, the IMF, the EU, the OAS and NGOs: how states built institutions above themselves, and where those institutions fall short.
Try 3 questions
1. Why did several of the earliest international organizations, founded in the 1860s and 1870s, deal with telegraphs and mail?
- Empires wanted a legal way to read each other's letters
- Postal workers had formed the first global labor union
- New technologies crossed borders and needed shared rules
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Answer: New technologies crossed borders and needed shared rules
Messages crossing many countries needed common tariffs, standards and procedures, so states created bodies like the telegraph and postal unions.
2. The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, founded in 1815, holds what distinction?
- It was the first international court to try war crimes
- It is the oldest international organization still operating
- It created the first shared currency in Europe
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Answer: It is the oldest international organization still operating
Set up at the Congress of Vienna to manage free navigation on the Rhine, it still regulates river shipping today.
3. What inspired Henry Dunant to found the Red Cross movement in 1863?
- A cholera epidemic in the city of Geneva
- Wounded soldiers left untended after Solferino
- A deadly shipwreck off the coast of Spain
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Answer: Wounded soldiers left untended after Solferino
After seeing thousands of wounded abandoned on the battlefield in northern Italy in 1859, Dunant proposed neutral relief societies.
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