Why international organisations?

The United Nations is often criticised as ineffective: during the 2006 war in Lebanon, for example, it could not stop the fighting for weeks. Yet it is also seen as humanity's greatest hope for peace.

Its second Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, put it well: the UN was not created to take humanity to heaven, but to save it from hell. It cannot make the world perfect; it can stop it from getting much worse.

What an international organisation is: it is not a super-state with power over countries. States create it, decide what it should do, and it answers to them. It works only as well as its members let it.

Why we need them: wanting to cooperate is not the same as actually cooperating. Countries may all agree something should be done but each waits for the others, or fears being cheated. An international organisation helps by:

• giving a meeting place to talk and settle conflicts peacefully (in fact, most disputes between countries are settled without war);
• tackling problems no country can solve alone: disease, global warming, terrorism, refugees;
• making rules and having a staff (bureaucracy) so that costs and benefits are shared fairly and members keep their promises.

Not every organisation is equal inside. In the International Monetary Fund (IMF), voting depends on how much money a country puts in. The rich G-7 countries together hold about 41 per cent of the votes, so the members do not have an equal say.

So international organisations are imperfect tools, but the world's problems are too big to face without them.