The quality of executive leadership may prove to be the most critical single determinant of the growth in scope and authority of international organization. Now sufficiently long and varied to allow a comparative approach, the history of international organization may provide elements for a theory of leadership. This essay is but a preliminary effort in that direction. It is concerned not only with how the executive head protects and develops his position as top man but also with how, by doing so, he may be the creator of a new (if yet slender) world power base.

In recent years considerable concern has been expressed in the United States over the changing composition of the United Nations membership and the failure of the one-state, one-vote formula in the General Assembly to reflect the actual power and significance of the different United Nations Members. “Malapportionment” as such is frequently not the issue here, for whether one looks at population, wealth, or budget assessments the United Nations General Assembly has always been “malapportioned.” And, at least in terms of population, the United Nations is no more malapportioned now than it was in 1945. Rather than a concern with a new situation, the growing emphasis on this issue is often a reflection of the fear that malapportionment will now operate to the disadvantage of the United States; that is, the ”overrepresented” states of today may not be as closely associated with the United States as the ”overrepresented” states of the past.

Karl Deutsch has argued that since the mid-1950's the structural, or institutional, political integration of Western Europe has come to a halt. What Deutsch means by the halt of political integration in Western Europe is the ending of any trend toward the development or the expansion of the authority of supranational institutions to make major policy decisions. Political decisions will continue to be made by sovereign nationstates and not by any supranational European institutions. Although institutional political integration is the central variable in his analysis, Deutsch reports no attempts to directly measure the decisionmaking capability of any Western European supranational institution. By accepting the validity of his sociocausal paradigm of political integration, which holds that political integration cannot occur until after a process of social assimilation creates a homogeneous transnational population, Deutsch contends that in order to describe the levels of political integration in Western Europe he need only examine data relating to the levels of social homogeneity which characterize that region. To measure the extent of social assimilation in Western Europe Deutsch examines the transaction flow rates of trade, mail, travel, migration, and student exchange data and studies the responses of mass and elite population samples to a complex series of survey questions. Deutsch's analysis of these varied data leads him to conclude that the levels of social assimilation in Western Europe have 1) remained constant for the past decade and 2) are too low to permit institutional political integration to occur.

Listed below is the membership of United Nations bodies for 1969. Unless otherwise noted, membership expires on December 31 of the year indicated in parenthesis. Where names of individuals are listed, the members serve in their personal capacities and not as representatives of states; their nationalities are given for information only.

The General Assembly held its 23rd session, comprising the 1674th–1752nd plenary meetings, at UN Headquarters from September 24 to December 21, 1968, during which time it took action on 94 agenda items and adopted 117 resolutions. During the session the Assembly unanimously admitted Swaziland to UN membership on September 24, 1968, and Equatorial Guinea to membership on November 12, 1968, thereby bringing the Organization's total membership to 126.