“We do not want to entrust to five great Powers or to two great Powers the task of deciding … what our common destiny will be…”.

To anyone who attended the great assemblage gathered at San Francisco in 1945 to write the Charter for the United Nations, these words have a familiar ring. Indeed, they might have been uttered (and no doubt were ad nauseam) by small-power representatives during the seemingly interminable debates over the rule of unanimity—the veto—in the Security Council. In fact, these words were spoken in February 1965 by the Mauritanian delegate explaining, on the final day of the “abortive” nineteenth session of the General Assembly, why he voted with Albania in protest against the “basis of consensus” which had governed the session.

Parliamentary diplomacy in international organization has its roots in the movement toward “diplomacy by conference.” As early as 1928, Frederick S. Dunn could assert:

The rapidity with which the conference method has come to the forefront in the conduct of international intercourse is one of the most striking developments in the present era of world affairs. Within the space of a very few years, this method has almost entirely supplanted bilateral diplomatic negotiation in matters of interest to more than two or three nations.

At the end of its twentieth year the United Nations is in the midst of a constitutional crisis the outcome of which is still in doubt. During its lifetime it has survived other profound changes, some no less constitution shaking than the present one. Other developments were absorbed chiefly through a process of informal Charter interpretation and institutional adaptation; whereas the current financial crisis was allowed to reach the stage where formal confrontation of conflicting Charter interpretations could be avoided only by adopting a procedural device to evade decision that, unfortunately, also brought the Assembly to a halt.

It is a truism that the text of the Charter gives a quite misleading picture of the United Nations as it is today. In no respect is this more true than in the working of the Organization in the maintenance of international peace and security. Those provisions of the Charter which were claimed by its authors to provide the new Organization with teeth that the League of Nations did not have either have never been used or have in practice been of little importance. New emphases and new methods have been developed through the liberal interpretation of Charter provisions. These have not always been equally acceptable to all Members, however. The process of adaptation and development continues, with great present uncertainty as to what the future has in store.

The differences which have been building up within the United Nations in recent years over the financing of peacekeeping have reached a point where strenuous measures are needed to rescue the Organization from its divisions and paralysis.

In 1964 Secretary-General U Thant asserted that more significant progress in achieving some measures of disarmament has taken place since the summer of 1963 than in all the years since the founding of the United Nations.

The evidence cited included five achievements: 1) the coming into force in October 1963 of the Moscow Treaty, a partial test-ban treaty banning nuclear-weapons tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water to which more than 100 states had subscribed by 1965; 2) the establishment of the direct communications link between Moscow and Washington; 3) the resolution of the General Assembly to ban nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction from outer space; 4) the unilateral reductions of the military budgets of the Soviet Union and the United States; and 5) the mutual cutbacks in production of fissionable material for military purposes by these two countries and the United Kingdom.

The United Nations two decades after San Francisco is a very different body from the one which its creators fashioned, and it is a reasonable presumption that there were none or virtually none who presided over its creation who foresaw even dimly what it would become in the short span of twenty years. In particular, few could have believed at that time that the tidal wave of anticolonialism would sweep so drastically over the domains of the imperial powers and leave behind in its wake an organization so largely populated by the new Asian and African states which emerged from the deluge. It is also one of the significant elements in the situation that few could have imagined that the process of decolonization could be carried through with so little needed in the way of violent struggle by the colonial peoples and so much conceded in peaceful acquiescence by their colonial masters. One of the world's great revolutions has been accomplished with a minimum of revolutionary action and sacrifice.

Some writing about the UN may suggest that there are those who conceive of the elephant that is the United Nations largely in terms of its human rights programs. The allusion to the fabled task of the blind men is not intended to impugn the vision of those who concentrate on that significant United Nations activity. The United Nations is a multifaceted and incongruous body, and the broadest view would not permit seeing it whole and in detail at the same time. Aware of the inevitable distortion that concentration brings, I would on this occasion look at this particular limb, hoping not to lose sight of the fact that it is part of a living if strange beast in a real world.

A Point of departure for considering the evolution of t!he judicial function in the United Nations system can be found in three interrelated decisions of principle incorporated in the UN Charter itself, of which the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) forms an integral part.

Legal controversy within the United Nations has resulted from the confrontation of the Organization's purposes with the specific rules set forth in the Charter for their implementation. Two sections of the Charter stand out as having produced yet unresolved legal tangles: One is the provision relating to the maintenance of international peace and security through effective collective action; the other is the group of provisions relating to self-determination and human rights. The Cold War and the attempts of the Great Powers to use the UN to attain or defend their policy objectives have shaped the attitude of Members toward the law and the role of law in the more clearly political activities of the UN. Consequently, politico-legal controversy has arisen with respect to the allocation of competences and powers between the General Assembly and the Security Council, the manner of operation of these two bodies, and the distribution of responsibility for “enforcement action’ between the UN and regional organizations.

In 1961 the General Assembly declared the 1960's to be the UN Development Decade and called for intensified efforts to accelerate progress toward self-sustaining growth. During 1965, designated International Cooperation Year, the United Nations is to take stock of the progress made thus far. Next to peace and security, which are preconditions for progress in all fields, international cooperation to promote economic and social development of the less developed countries now holds the highest priority for United Nations action.

This discussion purports to review some of the more significant developments that have marked the management of UN operational programs during recent years. The emphasis of the commentary is on the highlights of field administration since 1960 when the research for the present writer's more extensive study on this subject was completed.

On October 4, 1957, when Sputnik I was successfully orbited, it was popular to say that mankind had entered a new age—the Age of Space. If this was not just hyperbole, perhaps we are entitled to make a few judgments about the Space Age as it moves toward the end of its first decade. For, even from this short a perspective, the Space Age sharply illustrates the portentous conflict in our time between the forces of neonationalism and, for want of a better word, internationalism.

By the Charter of the United Nations the Secretariat is established as one of the six principal organs of the United Nations. The Secretary-General is designated ‘the chief administrative officer,’ not—be it noted—of the Secretariat but of the Organization. The Secretariat comprises the Secretary-General together with the staff appointed by him. The two institutions, the Secretariat and the Secretary-General, may well be regarded as distinct but inseparable—distinct in that the Charter confers in Articles 98 and 99 certain functions and powers specifically on the Secretary-General; inseparable in that the Secretariat is a unitary institution, organized on a functional basis, the members of which are ‘subject to the authority of the Secretary-General’ and ‘responsible to him in the exercise of their functions.’

The United States was the principal architect and builder of the United Nations, and the great mass of the American people welcomed the new edifice with enthusiasm and high—perhaps too high—hopes for a new world. Now, two decades and many crises later, United States opinion is wiser and more ambivalent. A large majority of the public still gives general support to the United Nations, but its enthusiasm is tempered by experience, and a vociferous minority holds views ranging from biting criticism to total rejection.

From its founding the United Nations has been a frequent source of puzzlement and embarrassment to Soviet policy makers. Given the reticence of Soviet statesmen, past and present, and the inaccessibility of Soviet diplomatic archives, we can only speculate about the expectations which were in the minds of Premier Joseph Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov when they gave their approval to the Moscow Four-Nation Declaration on General Security of October 1943, the first great-power commitment to the establishment of a new international organization. For United States policy makers, certainly, this unprecedented commitment, buttressed by the Vandenberg Resolution, marked an important change in their nation's perspective and purpose. It represented a new determination, even if a vaguely defined one, to cooperate with other nations in establishing and maintaining a better foundation for international peace and order. For the Soviet leaders, who were celebrating the grim liberation of Kiev in the midst of the Moscow Conference, there was probably little time, and certainly no leisure, to speculate about the possible congruence or incongruence of Soviet ambitions with the stabilizing and even static assumptions that underlay a revived and expanded peacekeeping league of states.

The British Commonwealth of Nations and the United Nations have today at least one thing in common, namely, that each faces a crisis so serious as to threaten its very survival. Nor are the reasons for the crises so very different. In part they stem from the nature of the two institutions. Both are associations of sovereign states, each one of which views the Commonwealth or United Nations relationship as only one strand–and only rarely the most important strand–in a complex and variegated web of relationships.

When French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand proposed in 1929 to establish “a sort of federal bond” between the European members of the League of Nations, these states numbered 27 out of a total membership of 60. Today the United Nations has a membership of 114 states of which 23 are European. Of these 23 states, seven are popular democracies. (The Soviet Union, a special case, is not included in this calculation.) There remain sixteen countries extending in the form of a crescent from Finland to Ireland to France and from Portugal to Turkey which are part of the “free” or “Western world.” The conclusion is obvious. The League of Nations was dominated by Europeans who furthermore controlled a large part of the overseas world in the form of colonies, protectorates, and mandates. The United Nations, where the major influence, linked to power, is exerted by the United States and the Soviet Union, is dominated by non-Europeans. This non-European domination—political, psychological, and moral—is the fundamental phenomenon, and it is the subject of this study.

When the governments of the Latin American states were taking part in the negotiations leading to the founding of the UN, they could hardly have done so with nostalgic memories of the League of Nations. The League had provided no protection to the Caribbean countries from interventions by the United States, and, largely because of United States protests, it did not consider the Tacna-Arica and Costa Rica-Panama disputes in the early 1920's. Furthermore, Mexico had not been invited to join; Brazil withdrew in 1926; and Argentina and Peru took little part in League affairs. The organization was regarded as being run mainly for the benefit of European states with the aid of what Latin Americans called an “international bureaucracy,” in which citizens from the southern hemisphere played minor roles. The United States was, of course, not a member, and both the reference to the Monroe Doctrine by name in Article 21 of the Covenant and the organization's practice of shunning any attempt to interfere in inter-American affairs against the wishes of the United States made the League in its first decade a remote and inefficacious institution to countries that were seriously concerned about domination by Washington.

In terms of the opening phrase of the Charter of the United Nations—“We the peoples of the United Nations”—the dominant image which comes to mind is that of Asia. Though not all the countries of Asia are Members of the United Nations—notably Korea, Vietnam, and now Indonesia—the Asian peoples of the United Nations (including the Chinese) not only greatly exceed in numbers those from any of the other major areas of the world but considerably outnumber all the peoples from these areas taken together.