Where would we be now without UNESCO?

Read “The world needs both skeptical intelligence and vision.” by Paul Kennedy in The InterDependent (magazine of the United Nations Association of the United States of America), Vol. 4, No. 4, Winter 2006/07. The article is on pages 15 and 16.

Paul Kennedy is the author of The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations and a great historian and writer. He says in part:

What does our world posses today, because of the United Nations organization, that it did not possess in, say, 1942-43, the middle of the Second World War?...

We have established a stunning array of international bodies to respond to the needs of the world’s women and children, especially the poorest and most discriminated against...

We have established an international human rights regime that for all its dreadful setbacks may be the single most significant advance in our globe mentality—in our way of thinking about the rights of others—since the campaigns against slavery...

We are steadily, and with setbacks and grudging opposition, setting up an international monitoring regime to protect our environments, local, national and global, and to safeguard future generations from the all too obvious harm that neglect of our ecologies can bring...

We have, alongside all this institutional building, witnessed the emergence of the idea of an international civil society. It is vague, contested and always in flux, which is probably a good thing. It has developed thanks to the profound technological, economic, social and ideological transformations of the post-1945 era. And it has done so not apart from international institutions, but in conjunction with them...

Of course, Kennedy is addressing the entire United Nations system of organizations, but UNESCO plays an especially important role in each of the efforts mentioned above.