This essay aims to assess the prospects of a larger role for multilateral assistance in world development. It does not attempt to review the familiar, often extreme, arguments made in favor of either bilateral or multilateral aid. It rejects the notion that the realizable possibilities of the many multilateral institutions and programs treated in detail in the other essays in this volume can be assessed as a unitary whole. The effort here will be to identify the specific kinds of multilateral aid which have especial potential of political support from aid-giving countries in the near future. As for the more distant future the reader is forewarned that the domestic politics of assistance, at least in this decade of stagnating support of aid of all kinds, recognizes no significant distinction between multilateral and bilateral aid. The web of will to help others develop is finely and infrangibly woven.

More rapid industrial and agricultural development of the economically underdeveloped three-quarters of the globe is the most important long-run task in international relations, with the sole exception of avoiding major warfare. While economic development depends primarily upon domestic efforts to marshal and direct resources, both human and material, the marshaling and direction of supplementary external resources can assist materially in attempting to achieve that objective. While the major external resources necessary to supplement domestic efforts will continue to be governmental and intergovernmental assistance, there has been for some time now, and will doubtless continue to be, a substantial insufficiency of such resources.

The relationship between international organization and developing countries is one of interdependence: developing countries place hope in disinterested help through international agencies; and the needs of the developing world provide stimulus to the expansion of international organization. Yet these two contemporaneous processes of political development—the growth of international organization and nation building in developing areas—may not always be in step. Education is a convenient viewpoint from which to examine this relationship, with its element of discord and of convergence of interest. Education is a prominent aspiration of governments and people in developing countries and is widely considered to be a most efficacious instrument for modernization. This subject-matter limitation also makes it possible to focus on two international organizations: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as the agency primarily responsible for educational systems; and the International Labor Organization (ILO) because of its recent emphasis both on training in occupational skills and on the relevancy of the manpower factor for educational policy.

The world is witnessing not only a population explosion but a family planning revolution. For the first time in history there is concrete evidence that people throughout most of the world accept the need for family planning and desire that family planning services be made available to them. And for the first time in history we have the technical means to implement family planning programs—the pill, the intrauterine contraceptive device (IUCD), and other methods. Moreover, research now under way suggests that reliance on a contraceptive pill that must be taken daily or an IUCD that is presently unsatisfactory to 25 percent of those using it will some day be of only historical interest—mere shadows reflecting the dim dark ages in the history of family planning. Already researchers have had success with an injectable contraceptive that provides long-standing immunity from pregnancy.

It is characteristic of our time that its most profound problems are global, involving all men, yet the nations into which men have divided themselves have never been as numerous nor as sharply diverse. A hundred years ago poverty was the common lot of most human beings; today we find two sets of nations staring at each other across the oceans, one rich and one poor, with a growing gap between them. The technological revolution has continuously improved the levels of living in the rich countries; in the poor ones its principal effect has been to multiply human misery by causing a rise in human numbers at rates higher than ever before experienced.

The United Nations Advisory Committee on the Application of Science and Technology to Development has said:

The considered view of the Committee is that, in present circumstances, the wider and more intensive application of existing knowledge, suitably adapted to local conditions, provides the best prospect of securing rapid advancement in the developing countries.

Development planning has become a routine activity for large numbers of corporations as well as for public authorities at various levels, particularly national governments. The time has come to make an attempt to create a framework for all these activities at the highest, that is, the world, level. Several of the most important arguments in favor of the construction of such a world “indicative” development plan1 will thus be discussed in this introductory section.

Unctad I, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development held in Geneva in the spring of 1964, marked a major milestone in international concern with and approaches to the problems of less developed countries. The principal achievements of this mammoth, contentious, allegedly economic gathering, however, were in the political realm. Economic issues of great importance were raised but not resolved. Instead they were consigned for study and consideration to the elaborate continuing machinery born at Geneva, as well as to various previously established agencies, and eventually to the agenda for UNCTAD II, convened in New Delhi in early 1968.