The world community of peoples and nation-states has reached "a fork in the road", according to the United Nations Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, speaking last year during the height of the controversy on the invasion of Iraq led by the United States.
Mr Annan has since described that action as illegal. In anticipation of the political crisis for the UN arising from it, he set up a high level advisory group on the future of the world organisation, which has now reported in detail on the changes required to adapt to these new realities. He asked them to report on the greatest threats facing humankind, what collective action should be taken to tackle them and how UN reform can make that possible.
Their report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, is a probing and challenging document which deserves close attention and informed debate ahead of a UN summit next year to initiate a process of reform. The report identifies six main threats facing the international community: war between states; violence within states, including civil war, human rights abuses and genocide; poverty, infectious diseases and environmental degradation; nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons; terrorism; and transnational organised crime.
The report analyses these threats and proposes ways the UN can deal with them by reforming its legal structures and political decision-making. It argues that even within the existing legal framework of the UN Charter there is more scope for preventive action to tackle such threats before they become critical.
Five stringent tests are proposed to determine the validity of such action. The report offers a clear definition of terrorism as "any action that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants". It advocates strengthened peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding capacities, with more reliance on regional organisations such as the European Union to provide them. And it puts forward a plan for a UN Peacekeeping Commission to tackle them.
The UN's representative and decision-making systems are crucial for its legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with these threats. They badly need changing to bring them more into line with world realities in the early 21st century, not those that followed the end of the second World War when the UN was founded.
Mr Annan wants to avoid the mistake made at a previous historic fork in the road, when the refusal of the United States to join the League of Nations in the 1920s, gravely weakening its capacity.
The US now faces a similar choice between unilateral isolation and UN engagement. The UN itself must adapt to the end of the Cold War and to a much more diverse world.
That means broadening the Security Council and changing its decision-making. This report does a good job in opening up debate on the options involved for all its member-states. It deserves to be taken seriously as a platform for adaptation and reform.