That document was the U.N. Charter. 

The United Nations was born, in San Francisco in 1945, because these farsighted leaders understood that the world could no longer continue as it had, witnessing in the first half o the century two world wars, countless civil wars, genocide, mass expulsions of populations, and the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

So they drew up rules to govern international behavior and founded institutions in which nations could cooperate for the common good. 

The United Nations was pre- eminent among them.

For 60 years, we have reaped the benefits of this conclave in San Francisco. 

The United Nations' existence created the framework within which human progress was possible during the Cold War and beyond. 

More than 170 U.N.-assisted peace settlements have ended regional conflicts.

Although we are all far better off today than in 1945, criticism is rife.

The United Nations' credibility was down in the United States because it did not support the Bush administration on the war -- and it was down in the other 19 countries in the Pew Poll because it could not prevent the war. 

Since then, the United Nations has reeled from assaults over its handling of the oil- for-food program in Iraq, accusations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers in Africa and attacks from the U.S. Congress, including threats to withhold dues.

As U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told world leaders, we have come to a fork in the road. 

One way is the route marked "business as usual" -- leading to potential disaster for all humankind. 

The other option is to review the entire architecture of the international system that has been built up since 1945 and renew it to build an effective house of global governance for the 21st century.

The divisions over Iraq brought into sharp relief many of the fundamental questions that have plagued our world since the end of the Cold War: questions about pre-emptive war; the scourge of terrorism; weapons of mass destruction; intervening when states perpetrate injustices on their own citizens; and the persistent terror of underdevelopment -- such as the combination of poverty, drought, famine and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa that threatens more lives than Iraq ever did.

In March -- appropriately enough, on the first day of spring -- Secretary-General Annan offered his suggestions for how the United Nations might be changed to meet these new challenges in a report titled "In Larger Freedom," which comes from the preamble to the U.N. Charter, speaking of the United Nations' striving "to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom." 

By that magnificent phrase, U.N. founders showed that they understood that development is possible only in conditions of freedom, and that people only benefit from political freedom when they have at least a fair chance of a decent standard of living.

The secretary-general's proposals tackle all the key challenges: the need for a new deal on development, debt reduction and fair trade opportunities for poor countries; a reiteration of the principle of the international community's responsibility to protect the weak when their own states are unwilling or unable to do so; an affirmation of the need to agree on a comprehensive legal  convention on terrorism, ending the political debates over its definition; and a call for wide-ranging institutional reform to create more credible U.N. human-rights mechanisms as well as to bring the Security Council and the General Assembly into the 21st century.

But the secretary-general can only recommend; as in San Francisco 60 years ago, it is up to the governments of the world to take the decisions that can transform the organization. 

As President Harry Truman told the assembled signatories of the U.N. Charter in 1945: 

"You have created a great instrument for peace and security and human progress in the world.... 

"If we fail to use it, we shall betray all those who have died in order that we might meet here in freedom and safety to create it. 

"If we seek to use it selfishly for the advantage of any one nation or any small group of nations, we shall be equally guilty of that betrayal."

In 1945, the Golden Gate Bridge was only eight years old. Many things have changed since then. 

At the 2005 World Summit, to be held in New York in September, world leaders will meet to address the secretary-general's proposals. 

They will have an opportunity to make history again. 

Let us hope that they will have the boldness of vision, wisdom and courage to prove worthy of what their predecessors accomplished in San Francisco 60 years ago.

          ShashiTharoor@MaximsNews.com

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by Shashi Tharoor

Born in London in 1956, Shashi Tharoor was educated in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi (BA in History, St. Stephen's College), and the United States (he got his PhD at the age of 22 from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University).

Since 1978, he has worked for the United Nations, serving with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose Singapore office he headed during the "boat people" crisis. 

Since October 1989, he has been a senior official at UN HQ in New York, where, until late 1996, he was responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia.

From January 1997 to July 1998, he was executive assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. In July 1998, he was appointed director of communications and special projects in the office of the Secretary-General. 

Tharoor is the author of nine books, as well as numerous articles, short stories and commentaries in Indian and Western publications.

His books include Reasons of State (1982), a scholarly study of Indian foreign policy; The Great Indian Novel (1989), a political satire; The Five-Dollar Smile & Other Stories (1990); a second novel, Show Business (1992), which received a front-page accolade from The New York Times Book Review and was made into a motion picture titled Bollywood; India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), published on the 50th anniversary of India's independence and cited by President Clinton in his address to the Indian Parliament; Riot (2001), a novel about Hindu-Muslim violence in India; Nehru: the Invention of India (2003), a biography of India's first Prime Minister; and most recently, Bookless in Baghdad (2005), a collection of essays on writing and writers. He also co-authored, with the eminent painter M. F. Husain, a "coffee-table" book, Kerala: God's Own Country (2004).

Shashi Tharoor is the winner of numerous journalism and literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1991. 

In 1998, Shashi Tharoor was awarded the Excelsior Award for excellence in literature by the Association of Indians in America (AIA) and the Network of Indian Professionals (NetIP). 

He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in International Affairs from the University of Puget Sound in May 2000. 

In January 1998, he was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as a Global Leader of Tomorrow.

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