The United Nations (UN) is a complex, esoteric institution that many ignore or misunderstand. Often perceived as quasi-mythical or useless, it operates largely unnoticed. Its inner workings—vast bureaucratic networks, billion-dollar programs, and year-round General Assembly meetings in New York—are unfamiliar at best. Many view it as ineffective, believing it has failed to achieve its expressed goal of saving “future generations from the scourge of war.”
In her meticulously researched book, Global Governance: History of a Quiet Revolution within the United Nations, Marguerite Peeters reveals the profound, often overlooked impact of the UN on global society, making a compelling case for its significance. This work, accessible yet insightful for UN insiders as well, seamlessly connects the dots between the individuals and organizations that have driven the UN’s evolution over the years. Peeters illuminates the relationships that positioned the UN at the vanguard of global governance and the visionary ideas that transformed it into a key laboratory for an entirely new human anthropology, which it then promoted internationally.
Founded in 1945 in the devastating aftermath of WWII, the United Nations “was the largest international organization in terms of state membership that had then far existed.” With the express purpose of bringing together all the nations of the world, its membership rapidly expanded from the 50 states that first signed the UN Charter in San Francisco to the 192 states now engaging in its daily deliberations and formal meetings from New York to Nairobi.
However, as Peeters quickly points out, the UN project would not remain in the hands of sovereign member states for long. Over a relatively short time frame, it moved from being a state led project to a globalist movement. That movement was led by special interests and non-State actors, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), unbound by national priorities or democratic accountability.
As Peeters methodically demonstrates, it was not international cooperation per se that gave rise to the regime of global governance. Instead, it was shaped by the ideology of “internationalism” and novel power-sharing models pioneered by organizations like the International Labour Organization (ILO), where decision making was distributed among states, labor unions, and employers’ organizations. While this organizational model was not originally part of the UN Charter, it gained traction through two waves of UN conferences, the first beginning in the 1960s and the second in the 1990s.
During the first wave, international cooperation remained dominant but increasingly challenged. For example, it is true that sovereign States initially retained primary authority in key UN bodies like the Security Council, where hard power was at stake. However, as conferences on social, economic, and environmental issues were organized under the auspices of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the soft power of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was amplified. It was these conferences, held on the “periphery,” where these non-governmental and supranational actors gained significant influence in shaping global agendas.
Today, it would take both the layman and academic only a matter of hours at a UN meeting to observe just how far the UN’s technocratic intelligentsia has removed itself from the common man and the reality of his daily life and struggles.
As a result, international cooperation quickly became divorced from what gave it substance and legitimacy, namely, individual nations. This then gave way to “the will, identity, norms and objectives of national peoples [being placed] above their sovereignty.” According to Peeters, this shift was largely facilitated through “partnerships,” which she defines as the collaboration between the UN’s official governing mechanisms, like the UN Secretariat and specialized bodies like UNICEF, and non-governmental organizations.
This new form of cooperation became more formalized and more concrete with each UN Conference as insistence on their participation grew and as state collaborations with these organizations became more deeply embedded in conference outcomes. While states still negotiated and willingly adopted the outcome documents, they were increasingly shaped by the influence and direct contributions of non-state actors, as well as by supposed “experts” and dignitaries chosen specifically by the UN to lead these processes and who even sat on some delegations.
Slowly but surely, through the promotion of conference outcomes and the increased participation of NGOs and experts, the UN became a globalist institution, less and less defined by state participation and sovereignty and increasingly determined by the influence and vision of NGOs and experts. These actors, without any specific legal obligations or national ties, aligned themselves purposefully with a generic global population, a “we the people” comprised of nondescript global “citizens,” “children,” and “youth,” whom they not only defined, but also claimed to partner with and at the same time represent. Today, Peeters cites the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda as a prime example of how pervasive and far-reaching the UN’s global governance model has become.
What sets this book apart from more conventional accounts is Maguerite Peeters’s ability to lay out the historical genesis of this transformation and to clearly define it through the formal definitions of terms like “partnerships” and “internationalism.” In addition, while most studies portray the UN as a well-intentioned, albeit utopian, endeavor, Peeters reveals how its original state-led vision was deliberately redirected early on, hijacked by non-state actors who reshaped its trajectory far beyond the intentions of its founding members.
This shift is particularly evident in the way NGOs leveraged UN conferences to advocate for and normalize controversial concepts such as gender equality, reproductive rights, and empowerment. Successive conferences introduced, and then reaffirmed, language and ideas entirely absent from the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the UN’s founding documents. Over time, this created a new “globally normative framework” that while not initially agreed to or even promoted by member states, nonetheless profoundly shaped contemporary policies and political discourse.
As Peeters further demonstrates, it is not by chance that this new language was defined by the logic of power and underpinned by an anthropology that only considered “people’s ‘needs’ and ‘rights’—not people’s inherent, inalienable dignity in the traditional sense, open to divine transcendence.” Tied intimately to the ideology of internationalism and the world view of its globalist institutions, it ushered in the age of the new “Promethean” man who was “an absolute citizen divorced from the person he was. He was nationally and sexually undifferentiated.” In the new realm of global governance, this was Adam. The new man without roots and free to “make” himself, finally liberated from the constraints of sovereign states or the natural, moral order that historically defined and shielded humanity from arbitrary power.
Critiques of Peeters’s Analysis
Having worked in and around the United Nations for nearly 15 years, including with the Holy See, I have both observed and experienced many of the dynamics Marguerite Peeters accurately documents in her research. Below, I offer several critiques based on my firsthand perspective.
First, the challenge at the UN’s inception was not merely establishing a shared set of principles or rules to govern the international system but determining where to anchor them. This was most evident during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). At the time, the world was deeply divided—both ideologically and geopolitically—into the liberal democracies of the West and the autocratic communist regimes of the East. These blocs were underpinned by competing ideologies with fundamentally different views on reality, society, and human rights. Consequently, while States could agree on broad, intentionally ambiguous objectives like disarmament, development, or human rights, their interpretations of these principles diverged sharply, creating fertile ground for contention.
This ideological divide likely also facilitated the “quiet revolution” Peeters describes. Indeed, the UN’s original vision was not sufficiently objective or normatively robust to resist being reshaped by non-state or more ideological actors. Beyond the influence of NGOs and experts with distinct agendas, it was also this lack of a unified, philosophically sound foundation which allowed the UN’s trajectory to be redirected in ways that diverged from its State led origins. This much was also feared very early on by philosophers like Jaques Maritain who were tasked in the early 1940s by UNESCO with the impossible task of providing the UN with an agreed metaphysical framework, something he was never able to do.
Finally, while Peeters emphasizes the pivotal role of non-state actors, particularly NGOs, in transforming global governance, she overlooks the complicity of the member states themselves. Many NGOs, even those with international reach, operate locally with government funding and support. For instance, organizations like Planned Parenthood and foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller have long advanced agendas backed by significant state funding, often serving as proxies for state policies under the guise of local, community-driven initiatives. These same organizations also participate as experts on the delegations of the most vocal and powerful member states, like the United States, as well as the European Union and, increasingly, the Global South. This dynamic obscures the true chain of influence, as state-supported NGOs appear independent while actually promoting agendas aligned with governmental interests. Peeters’s analysis would benefit from acknowledging this interplay between states and NGOs in driving the global governance shift.
These critiques only provide further support to the undeniable conclusions drawn by Peeters with respect to the United Nations’ central role as the crucible for global governance. Today, it would take both the layman and academic only a matter of hours at a UN meeting to observe just how far the UN’s technocratic intelligentsia has removed itself from the common man and the reality of his daily life and struggles. Ironically, for as much as those immersed in the UN world speak about humanity and humanity’s problems, their ideological rhetoric, often antihuman in its anthropology, reminds one of Ivan Karamazov’s famous quote in Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.” This is the price the UN has paid for creating its own parallel universe, driven by its detached, increasingly abstract, globalist agenda. And yet, as Peeters shows us, this ideological abstraction deserves our close attention, especially given the profound effect it has had on real world, international politics and domestic social policy.
