India and the United Nations: Past and Future

The subject of today’s discussion is peacekeeping but you have asked me to speak on a much broader plane about the past and future of the United Nations. Last year marked a hundred years of multilateralism. The founding of the League of Nations in January 1920 to maintain peace and foster international cooperation represented the first real institutionalization of multilateralism. Though the League itself became moribund in less than two decades when the world drifted into World War II, the UN that succeeded it has survived for 75 years and remains today the only promise of a rule-based global order.