As the United Nations has developed and as its role in world affairs has been adapted to the necessities and possibilities created and the limitations established by the changing realities of international politics, collective legitimization has emerged as one of its major political functions. By this I mean to suggest that the world organization has come to be regarded, and used, as a dispenser of politically significant approval and disapproval of the claims, policies, and actions of states, including, but going far beyond, their claims to status as independent members of the international system. In this essay I shall undertake to refine and elaborate this rough definition of collective legitimization and to discuss the performance of this role by the United Nations. It is essential in the beginning, however, to provide a foundation by offering some observations about the general problem of political legitimacy.

The present strains on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance have far-reaching implications for members as well as nonmembers. In the current Scandinavian debate on security the year 1969 has become almost a magic number. In Norway there has even been talk of a national referendum on whether to continue membership in NATO. While recent polls show a majority in favor of the alliance, the margin is not large enough to preclude a change during the next three years. Parties, politicians, and pressure groups are already bracing themselves for a major campaign.

A functioning balance-of-power system, comparable to the one which existed throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, limits the ability of Small Powers to achieve their own goals. However, in compensation it provides more real security for them—in terms of the maintenance of independence—than other historical systems, all of which offered the Small Power some elements of maneuverability but to the detriment of long-range security. At first glance the contemporary political system appears to contradict this generalization: Surely, one would presume, the new status of Small Powers reflects a system in which the weaker units of international politics have finally achieved both security and influence. Nevertheless, a closer examination of actual patterns of interaction substantially qualifies this presumption: The original generalization, that is, remains basically sound.

Edwin Ginn's vision of world peace, as recorded in his last will and testament, involved him in a commitment to world government. World government, however, is an objective which seems to many mid-twentieth century observers of international politics excessively visionary. The nineteenth-century dream of a parliament of man, a federation of the world, fills a bright page in Victorian poetry. But much contemporary prose is written by men whose vision is obscured by space rockets, intercontinental ballistic missiles, atomic bombs, and other lethal weapons of ultramodern warfare. They see only a world of heavily armed, self-styled sovereign states bent on the protection of alleged vital interests and on the defense of so-called national honor with little patience for the restraints of any higher law designed to prevent them from making war upon one another.

Amendments to Articles 23, 27, and 61 of the Charter of the United Nations, adopted by the General Assembly on December 17, 1963, came into force on August 31, 1965. The amendment to Article 23 enlarges the membership of the Security Council from eleven to fifteen. The amended Article 27 provides that decisions of the Security Council on procedural matters be made by an affirmative vote of nine members (formerly seven) and on all other matters by an affirmative vote of nine members (formerly seven), including the concurring votes of the five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The amendment to Article 61 enlarges the membership of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) from eighteen to 27.

The General Assembly held its twentieth session, comprising the 1332nd–1408th plenary meetings, at UN Headquarters from September 21 to December 21, 1965. Part of the Assembly's proceedings were summarized in the Spring 1966 issue of International Organization and the remainder follows below.

Economic Commission for Africa: The seventh session of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) was held in Nairobi, Kenya, on February 9–23, 1965. The Commission welcomed Malawi and Zambia as full members of ECA and also recognized Tanzania as a member with a single identity, replacing the two members, Tanganyika and Zanzibar, which had formed a political union.

Marking the twentieth anniversary of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) the annual report on the state of food and agriculture reviewed the progress achieved during the second postwar decade, 1954/1955–1964/1965. In his foreword Director-General B. R. Sen noted three distinct phases of FAO's history. In the first, covering the postwar decade, FAO played a role in the task of reconstruction. The second phase, coinciding with the second postwar decade, had been marked by a number of significant developments in science and communications, in demography, and in national aspirations which influenced the outlook and work of FAO. Calling attention to the unprecedented rate of population growth and lagging food supply, FAO had warned that this trend implied a grave peril for the future peace and security of the world. The Freedom from Hunger Campaign launched by FAO in 1960 had represented a response to this new awareness of the dimensions of hunger and malnutrition in the world and of the responsibility of the world community to face the problem. The third phase of FAO's work, opening with the third postwar decade, would be a critical period. Mr. Sen referred to FAO studies, contained in the report, which indicated that the total food supplies of the developing countries would have to be increased fourfold in the next 35 years to give their rapidly expanding populations an adequate diet. The task of FAO, which would depend on the willingness of the leaders of the nations to devote a large share of the world's resources to meet the crisis, would be to assist in laying the foundation for this increase.

The ninth Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) took place in Montreux, Switzerland, between September 14 and November 12, 1965, under the chairmanship of Gustav-Adolf Wettstein (Switzerland). The main task of the Conference was the revision of the previous Convention, drawn up by the preceding Plenipotentiary Conference in Geneva in 1959. The new Convention was to enter into force on January 1, 1967. In one of its major decisions the Conference agreed in principle on a Constitutional Charter eventually to replace the Convention, and it instructed the Administrative Council to set up a study group to prepare the draft of such a charter in sufficient time for it to be distributed at least one year prior to the next Conference, scheduled to be held in 1971. The Conference approved the Union's accounts for the years 1959–1964 and fixed the limits of expenditure for the period 1966–1971, providing for slight annual increases in this expenditure. It also approved the purchase of the new headquarters building by December 31, 1965.