1917: Towards a Global Order1

Elements of governance created from 1917–1919 laid the foundation for a century of development of international institutions, practices and processes. Prominent features of this development are the protection of individual rights at the international level; concepts of international and collective responsibility; and an independent international civil service. Individual participation in international activity is now an accepted and assumed part of global governance. However, the elitism associated with such participation has fueled a sense of disenfranchisement despite the broader based and more diverse global political environment. The lesson to be learned is not to reject those developments, but to embrace their implications. The individuals whose voices the international system wanted to hear must now play an active role in its future evolution, and that role must be recognized and valued by their own governments. States' recognition after World War I that the institutions of the nineteenth century international system were inadequate to the challenges of the postwar world must be matched in 2017 by equal creativity in adapting twentieth century international institutions to meet the needs of the Peoples of the United Nations in the twenty-first century.