In the first dozen years of the UN's existence Middle East disputes came before the Security Council and appeared on the agenda of the General Assembly with greater frequency than did disputes in any other region of the world. Thereafter the Middle East did not always occupy the center of the UN's peacekeeping stage. Yet as recent developments in the Arab-Israeli area and in Cyprus and Yemen disclose, the Middle East remains a region of deep restiveness that continues to threaten world peace and security. Every regular session of the General Assembly, except the first session in 1946, has considered Middle East items. Two special sessions dealt with the Palestine problem, and two emergency sessions handled the Suez and Lebanese crises. The Security Council has turned to the Palestine problem or its lineal descendant, the Arab-Israeli dispute, at approximately every sixth meeting.

At the beginning of its nineteenth session the General Assembly of the United Nations decided by acclamation that Alex Quaison-Sackey, the permanent representative of Ghana, should preside over the session. This was only the second time in eighteen years that this, the highest honor in the Organization, was accorded to a representative of an African state, and the first time that a Negro African was thus chosen.

Only six of the small states of Western or Western oriented Europe participated in the United Nations Conference on International Organization at San Francisco. They were Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Norway, Luxembourg, and, after a struggle between the Soviet Union and its wartime allies, Denmark. Their participation followed, for the most part, the model of the “honorable, independent, disinterested small state”: sober, responsible, speaking mainly when spoken to, but assiduously seeking out ways to make their voices heard in the alleviation of international conflict. True, they were there as part of the winning coalition in World War II and shared the hopes and expectations of the larger Western powers concerning the role of the United Nations. But they joined similar countries outside Europe, particularly Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, in helping to shape a UN Charter which in certain ways differed from the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals. The role of the General Assembly was, for example, enlarged, thus modifying the special position of the Great Powers, and the scope of the United Nations in economic and social fields was expanded. The influence of the small states in Europe stemmed from the desire of the major Western allies, particularly the United States, to ensure the success of the enterprise by concessions to those whose participation would be necessary to make it a worthwhile undertaking.

Old soldiers may “just fade away” as General Douglas MacArthur reminded us, but the controversy over the relative merits of regionalism and globalism in international organization will ever be with us. That question generated as much heat as any other issue at San Francisco in 1945 with the possible exception of the veto. In more recent years the inadequacies of the United Nations, the changing nature of the Cold War, the growth and expansion of regional organizations, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the continued shrinking of the universe have kept the heat of this controversy at a relatively high level.

It may be unthinkable, even unimaginable, that the United Nations could itself become a true “community” in the near future. It is not unthinkable that the UN may be pushing the present disarray a little closer to that goal. The popular press abounds with loose references to the “world community,” but men who have thought deeply and hardheadedly about this prospect have also hinted in that direction, using various terms for the same thing. To quote only two, Lincoln P. Bloomfield calmly mentions “the universal society of which the United Nations is the forerunner” and Richard N. Gardner believes that a “genuine world community is waiting to be born. …”

As the United Nations stands on the threshold of its third decade, every Member of the Organization will do well to think about the kind of UN it wants, for that is what may well be achieved.

Undertaking to write about the future of the United Nations may well be regarded as a risky if not a downright foolhardy enterprise, particularly in 1965, between the tragicomedy of the nineteenth General Assembly and the great uncertainty of the twentieth session. For many people, the question is whether the United Nations has a future, and for some of them this question is purely rhetorical. I think that it has, or that, at any rate, general international organization has a future. Whatever may happen to the United Nations, I find it difficult to conceive that the men who conduct the foreign relations of states will ever again consider that they can dispense with a comprehensive institutional mechanism or that they will, in the foreseeable future, contrive a global mechanism fundamentally different in character from the United Nations. Objectively, the operation of the international system requires an organizational framework virtually coextensive with the system; just as education requires schools and universities and medicine requires hospitals and clinics, so international relations require at least as much organizational apparatus as the United Nations system provides. Moreover, there is evidence that this objective need has penetrated the consciousness of most statesmen. The questions that they have asked about international organization in the last twenty years have not included the question of whether it is sensible to equip the international system with a general institutional structure.