The UN

On Friday, I had the opportunity to go and do something really fun and completely unique to NYC: I went and took a tour of the UN headquarters.
Found out about the trip through someone I’d had a class with, and although I didn’t really know anybody in the group, it was a great time. One thing that stood out to me as being very apparent is that in order to understand the UN, you have to understand it grew up out of the ashes of WWII, and that it was built by the victors of that war. The UN won’t make sense if one doesn’t understand that as a reference point. I learned so much more than I have time to put down here, but I will include a few fun facts.

- Because the UN represents all the nations, the UN itself does not belong to any nation. So technically, when you’re on the grounds of the UN, you’re in international territory. That means cops from NYC need special permission to enter the grounds.
- The UN has been responsible for setting some interesting de facto standards. For example, the official language of all air traffic controllers is English. You’ll never hear another language being used in any air traffic control tower anywhere in the world.
- The UN is very clever about handling diplomatic courtesies. For example, the countries in the general assembly hall are seated alphabetically, but each year the speaker chooses the name of a country out of a hat, and that country is seated first, in the front left of the chamber, with the rest alphabetically behind that one (and the order wraps around again when they hit ‘Z’). That means that Afghanistan isn’t always in the front and Venezuela always in the back. The flags flown in front of the UN are also in alphabetical order, and flown at the same height.
One other thing I’ll say about the UN, I got the impression just in the short time I was there that these people take their work very seriously. They really believe that they are working each day to make the world a better place, and that is something to applaud. Much of my exposure to the UN has come from my studies in economics, where we’re often looking at how UN development projects have been flawed or ill-conceived; this visit provided a good point of balance.
I got some great pictures, I have shots of myself in both the general assembly and also inside the chamber where the Security Council meets. I’ll post a link up to an online photo book once I get around to posting all the photos up (if I’m not too lazy about it …)