Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations

Paul Kennedy does not shy away from large subjects. He is the author of, among many other works, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 1, which charted Europe’s extraordinary ascendancy to global pre-eminence over the course of nearly half a millennium. An assessment of the merely sixty-year-old United Nations would seem to offer a much less demanding assignment for someone of Kennedy’s demonstrated talent for large-canvas storytelling. As a subject for macro-reflection, however, the United Nations is a kind of intellectual quicksand – soft and inviting, but ultimately deadly. Thanks to Kennedy’s buoyant prose, his latest book, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations, succumbs more slowly than most to the quagmire on which he has chosen to tread. But by the final chapter, all that is visible above the smooth surface is an outstretched hand clutching a deadly dull list of proposals for UN reform. The problem with The Parliament of Man, the title of which is drawn from Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall,’ 2 is neither excessive length nor the short attention span of readers. Kennedy’s Rise and Fall was more than twice as long, but was, all kidding aside, a gripping read. Though the phenomenal rise of Europe was a matter of historical record, Kennedy managed to frame the story in such a way as to make the outcome appear doubtful. That a backwater like medieval Europe would outmanoeuvre the formidable Chinese and Ottomans in the race for worldwide hegemony became, in the hands of Kennedy, a genuine mystery. His epic narrative, spread over hundreds of years and thousands of miles, and populated by a cast of characters that could put Dostoyevsky to shame, was held together by Kennedy’s probing voice, which assumed the sceptical tone of the historical detective. For all the thematic variety and sheer historical coverage contained within its pages, Rise and Fall doggedly yet sensitively advanced a coherent line of argument: that Europe’s seeming weakness, its pronounced lack of unity, was in fact its most potent weapon in the Darwinian battle for civilisational survival. Through various mechanisms, competition between Europe’s kingdoms, principalities, and fledgling states ended up spurring innovation – political, economic, technological, social, and military.