The United Nations

ATLANTIC

March 1948

on the World today

THE United Nations is so much a part of our post-war world that only a fool or a dreamy idealist will expect it to perform as if it were distinctly separate from our world. This obvious fact leads us into a dangerous truism — namely, that until there is more top-level coöperation among nations the United Nations cannot begin to carry out its job as laid down in its Charter.

The truism is dangerous because if suggests that the United Nations is simply a debating society or an extra battleground for the cold war. United Nations decisions become then either heroic gestures or distorted applications of the Charter to serve the interests of one side or the other. The latter was a favorite interpretation of Assembly actions by Soviet orators.

Both interpretations spring from the naïve belief that the United Nations ushered in an entirely new era in the relationships between men and nations. If the United Nations appeared as the answer to the hopes and prayers of mankind, it actually expressed the imperative demands of nations for security. For wars are fought for national survival, and the directors of wars discover that nationalism is the most potent incentive to victory. Cities may be reduced to rubble, countrysides be laid waste, men, women, and children be slaughtered by the millions; but if the nation survives, every sacrifice has been worth while.

After World War II the smaller nations, some of which were virtually battered out of existence, have clung to the belief that peace has a slight advantage over nationalism. But the United States and the Soviet Union, the two big powers that survived the war, have been determined that any post-war arrangements would have to guarantee the national integrity of the United States and the Soviet Union.

It is significant that the Yalta Conference of 1945, while the two powers were still buddies in arms, drafted the first working plan for the United Nations and at the same time drew the boundaries of the Russian and American spheres of influence. And the inviolability of national sovereignty, one of the classic occasions for wars in the past, was written into the world’s new Charter for peace.

United Nations: a compromise

The long-sighted realist will say that a system of security based on national sovereignty is a quicksand foundation for peace in an atomic age. And in the long run he is right. Even the nationalist statesmen of Yalta and Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco grudgingly admitted that peace could not be built on power alone, particularly when that power was divided between two somewhat unfriendly giants.

It was a certain cold realism, therefore, which forced them to give serious thought to the possibilities of an international order which would regulate the life of nations as the modern state regulates the life of its citizens. This realism provided a common meeting ground for the devotees of peace and the devotees of power, for the war-weary people who saw visions and dreamed dreams and the prudent statesmen who know that nationalism sometimes wins wars. The United Nations emerged as a compromise between the claims of national security and the claims of international order. The Security Council and the General Assembly represent these competing claims forced into an uneasyalliance. Power is concentrated in the Security Council; the General Assembly is limited to discussion, investigation, and recommendations.

on the United Nations

No substantial action can be taken by a mere majority decision of the peace-loving nations of the world. The final word has to come from the two great powers and the three other powers called “great" by courtesy, who with their five permanent seats dominate tho Security Council. Moreover, each of the greater powers is given protection against any unfavorable action on the part of a majority of its Security Council colleagues, by having the right to veto any action it does not approve.

THE big are strong

There are good, practical reasons for this concentration of power. Any substantial action directed as a disciplinary measure against a member state would place considerable responsibility on the big powers who had the armies and the industrial strength. Power and responsibility are hard to separate in the enforcement of peace.

And there are valid reasons for the veto as well. It is difficult to see how strong action could be taken over the opposition of one of the major powers. And any significant advance towards world order must be made with the full coöperation of the big powers. A majority decision may bind the members who concur, and compel the members who dissent — if they happen to be small states. But a majority decision cannot compel a minority which is led by a major power — as Russia’s several boycotts of limited Assembly actions prove.

Majority action could, of course, force a dissident big power out of the United Nations, but such an action would be an abject admission of defeat for the larger objectives of the United Nations.

It was apparent at the birth of the United Nations that, in the post-war world, national policies were going to have free play except where they constituted acts of aggression. And even where acts of aggression were evident or suspect, if a great power were implicated it could block any sanctionary action by its veto. International coöperation was hoped for; its instruments were forged. In the long run it was recognized as a necessity of survival. But the architects of the Charter saw that coöperation could not be proclaimed by fiat. The Charter was a blueprint for peace and security: it could not be considered a finished picture of a war-proof house.

Those who planned and engineered the United Nations greatly underestimated the effect of war on the economies of nations and the minds of men. For the people of the United States the end of the war meant the return to normal living and the scrapping of wartime controls. It meant unprecedented prosperity. For Europe it meant economic chaos, poverty, and starvation; post-war relief served barely to keep populations alive. No European nation had the resources to rebuild its national economy. At least a year too late the United States began to realize that the economic plight of Europe had an immediate bearing on its own economic and perhaps strategic security.

Struggle for power

The war’s effects on men’s minds were even greater. In America, victory was interpreted as the triumph of Western methods of political and economic organization, a triumph for capitalist democracy. In Europe, on the other hand, the war released revolutionary forces only partly accounted for by the influence of Russia, which expressed themselves in forms of violent upheaval or gradual reform, depending on the degree of democratic development in the country concerned.

The uneasy tension between the great powers was transformed into an active struggle for power. The Soviet Union, taking advantage of the new forces released by the war and the deepening economic distress, made use of well-organized and disciplined Communist Parties in the nations beyond its immediate sphere of influence. The United States countered by ad hoc aid to the most threatened salients.

It so happened that American aid went first to one of the most reactionary governments of Europe, which was engaged not only in fighting Communist-led guerrillas but in stamping out all forms of democratic and liberal expression. America’s aid to Greece combined with America’s antipathy to socialist advances in Western Europe was grist for the Communist mill. Late in the day the Marshall Plan gave the democrats of Western Europe the hope they were so desperately seeking.

The cold war moves in on the UN

The United States aimed to buttress its defenses against the threats of Soviet expansion by using wherever possible the majority in the Assembly to compensate for vetoed actions in the Security Council. From the broader standpoint of world peace its aims were justified. Russian Communist maneuvers in Europe were much more active threats to world equilibrium and to world peace itself than any countermoves on the part of the United States. American sins were of omission — failure to aid democracies rather than actions menacing Russian-held positions.

Russia’s objective was partly to buttress its own defense against threats from the consolidating alliance of the Western nations, partly to encourage discontent among smaller and colonial peoples with America’s alleged imperialist, capitalist ambitions. Both sides claimed support from the Charter of the United Nations. The Soviets charged that the United States was subordinating the Charter to American power aims and threatening the national sovereignty of small nations; the United States insisted that Soviet action, through the veto, had frustrated almost even constructive effort at international coöperation.

What neither side appreciated was that the Assemble belonged to the middle and the smaller nations rather than to the big powers. And these nations were more concerned with the preservation of peace than with the shifting fortunes of the bigpower struggle. If it came to a showdown, most of them would choose the American side. But they were anxious not to force that showdown. If the big powers were wedded to their cold war, the middle and small nations would make a determined effort to prevent the United Nations from being transformed into either a battleground or a recruiting station.

Small nation strive for peace

While Vishinsky, Bebler, and Manuilsky, Johnson, Dulles, and Austin, were catching the headlines, the solid work in the Assembly was being done by Spaak of Belgium, Aranha of Brazil, Pearson of Canada, Evatt of Australia. The talented British team could not make up its mind whether to play a big-power second line or run interference for the small powers. They tried both.

The useful work of the small nations is apparent in three important issues — Greece, the Little Assembly, and Palestine. In Greece, it was Spaak of Belgium who, taking no back talk from Vishinsky, nevertheless insisted that the Assembly’s main job was to find a settlement, not to lay blame for past misdeeds. Spaak had no more love for Tsaldaris of Greece than for Tito of Yugoslavia, and insisted that the clauses accusing Greece’s northern neighbors of most of the trouble in the Balkans be removed from the American resolution. But Spaak and other leaders of the small-nation group were firmly behind a Balkan commission to play watchdog on the Greek border.

The American Littie Assembly plan was launched as the answer to the Security Council deadlock. It would meet in constant session and deal in an efficient, untrammeled fashion with matters threatening peace. The Russians naturally shouted that the Charter was being violated and the United Nations assassinated.

The leaders of the small powers took a sober and balanced view of the proposal. With no love for the veto, they thought an Interim Committee might be a good way to bring disputes to world attention before they had gone too far. But they were very leery of the original American proposals, which they considered loose and broad and open to some of the Russian charges. At the urging of Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and others, the Little Assembly was cut down to size.

The Palestine settlement provides the best illustration of small-power activity. In this case it was not so much big-power antagonism as big-power inaction that threatened a constructive decision. Both Russia and the United States were in favor of partition, but each had its own plan for enforcement. The British meanwhile sulked in their tents. Lester Pearson of Canada should be given most of the credit for working out a scheme which, if boldly implemented, would provide the maximum of justice to Arabs and Jews. His plan carried solid United States backing, was acceptable to Britain as the retiring mandatory power, and eventually won more than a two-thirds majority of the Assembly.

But Pearson’s brilliant work in committee would have been unavailing without the constructive support of other delegates from small powers — Evntt of Australia, Pruszynski of Poland, Fabregat of Uruguay, Granados of Guatemala. The Palestine settlement was the most important decision yet taken by the United Nations; in working it out the big powers played a comparatively minor part.

The pressure for peace

It is significant, then, that when the cold war moved in on the United Nations it did not destroy it. Nor did its main protagonists dictate Assembly action. The role of the small nations has a particular relevance to ordinary people in this and other lands, for whom the United Nations is still the main hope of peace. Small nations, like individuals, freed from the immediate burdens and corruption of power, see with greater clarity the great potentialities of a world organization.

The United Nations continues as an uneasy compromise between the claims of power and the claims of international order. As long as national sovereignty exists, that compromise will remain. There is no more chance today of legislating out of existence the big-power conflict than of legislating into existence a world government or an international order based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter.

The balance-of-power maneuvers will continue, the cold war will go on, but against them will be the continued pressure of men and nations who realize that another war will be the death of us all, and who feel the necessity of building a world community that will sustain law and order. The United Nations provides the chief means, perhaps the sole means, of maintaining that pressure for peace.