by Brian Endless, PhD, President, AMUN

“The day will come when men will see the UN and what it means clearly. Everything will be all right — you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction, and see it as a drawing they made themselves.” Dag Hammarskjold, 1955.

There are days when the world wants the United Nations to be able to do everything. To solve every problem. To fix every ill. But that’s not the real world or the real United Nations. And on UN Day, on this 71st Anniversary of the organization, it seems appropriate to reflect on the words above that Dag said over 60 years ago. They are just as true today as they were in 1955.

And beyond the important lessons about international relations and international politics, Model UN also teaches us about many things we don’t often get from a traditional classroom. Learning about diplomacy, compromise, public speaking and crafting agreements are key elements of the Model UN experience. Some students learn these skills from scratch, while others walk in with some skills in hand and improve them along the way. But for all of us, it is a unique experience.

When we simulate the United Nations, there is a tendency to focus on the “fun” and “exciting.” Peace and security often tops the list. Or perhaps we focus on solving a refugee crisis. Or possibly global health, protections for the press, or human rights and gender identity. These are all topics that are in the news and that we want the United Nations to solve, but the excitement can quickly give way to frustration. In learning about the United Nations, we learn that the problems facing the world are complex. They are not easy to solve, or someone would have solved them already. Practical realities, resources and politics often get in the way.

We often enter the world of Model UN with an enormous amount of idealism about what the United Nations can do. At its best, Model UN should not destroy that idealism, but Model UN should temper unbridled optimism with a dose of reality about how the world of international politics really works. When you are one country among 193, and everyone is working to fulfill their own foreign policy interests, then you rarely get everything you want. And sometimes you have to settle for a small victory, and move on to the next battle. This is how life works, and it is reflected well in Model UN.

Yet even with that hefty dose of reality, we also need to remember that the United Nations absolutely has solved some enormous problems and has the capacity to continue to do so. The eradication of  smallpox and the near elimination of polio. Enormously increased life expectancies. Vaccinations. Literacy. Human rights for women and children. All of these, and many others, have improved dramatically because of the United Nations. Millions of real people are the beneficiaries of those successes. This is another important lesson for Model UN students: the way you view the problem is half the battle. Even if you don’t achieve complete success, partial victories are incredibly important to the people who are helped.

In closing, I want to offer another thought from Dag Hammarskjold: “Steady, detailed effort is hard to dramatize, and it seldom makes headlines, but who can doubt that the transformations and crises of the past thirty years would have been infinitely more painful and far less subject to peaceful resolution without the United Nations?”‘ The United Nations has given an enormous amount to the world, and Model UN students have much to learn from that success!