The following summary covers the activities of the Security Council from its 783d meeting on August 20, 1957, through its 790th meeting on September 9, 1957.

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.

Annual Report of the Board of Governors to the General Conference: The report of the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to the seventh General Conference of the Agency covered the period July 1, 1962, to June 30, 1963. The report noted that one of the significant developments during the past year had been the General Assembly's decision at its seventeenth session to hold a third International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva in 1964. There had also been in developing countries an increasing interest in nuclear power, and preliminary survey teams had been sent by the Agency to Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand.

Originally designated by the terms of its Constitution as an international agency for the collection and dissemination of information in the field of nutrition, food, and agriculture, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations developed a much wider field of activity during 1946, its first working year. Recognizing the need for an international agency with real administrative powers, the FAO assumed the task of helping to ameliorate the world food crisis, while at the same time setting up an organization for long-range planning and statistical work.

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.

Weighted voting at the UN has been suggested for various reasons: (1) to overcome the problems of the mini-states now being admitted, with one vote just as the very large states have; (2) to prevent voting in the General Assembly from swinging any further in the anti-West, anti-Israel direction; (3) to satisfy the requirements of democratic justice: i.e., “one person-one vote,” not “one nation-one vote”; and, (4) to reflect more realistically the distribution of power among nations.

In January 1974 the Council of Ministers of the European Community issued a resolution calling for the coordination of the science and technology policies of the member countries. This initiative came after several years of largely unrewarded efforts by the European institutions to bring a measure of Community-wide coherence in national R&D programs and objectives. Despite the development of alternative decision-making and implementation procedures, the Community's impact on national activities was on the whole limited in scope, confined to programs of marginal importance and more concerned with the joint execution of specific research tasks than with the political motives and intentions of the member governments. A review of the 1974 resolution's effects, principally through the work of the CREST committee, demonstrates that the multiple obstacles to policy coordination have yet to be overcome. These obstacles stem from a) varying conceptions of the policy coordination task, b) the discrepancies and inadequacies in national science policy formulation, c) deficiencies in the perspectives and procedures of Commission officials and national delegations, and d) a variety of constraints which restrict the domain of possible Community intervention.

International organizations come in many shapes and sizes. Within this institutional gamut, the multipurpose multilateral intergovernmental organization (MMIGO) plays a central role. This institutional form is often traced to the creation of the League of Nations, but in fact the first MMIGO emerged in the Western Hemisphere at the close of the nineteenth century. Originally modeled on a single-issue European public international union, the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics evolved into the multipurpose, multilateral Pan American Union (PAU). Contrary to prominent explanations of institutional genesis, the PAU's design did not result from functional needs nor from the blueprints of a hegemonic power. Advancing a recent synthesis between historical and rational institutionalism, we argue that the first MMIGO arose through a process of compensatory layering: a mechanism whereby a sequence of bargains over control and scope leads to gradual but transformative institutional change. We expect compensatory layering to occur when an organization is focal, power asymmetries among members of that organization are large, and preferences over institutional design diverge. Our empirical and theoretical contributions demonstrate the value a more global international relations (IR) perspective can bring to the study of institutional design. international relations (IR) scholars have long noted that international organizations provide smaller states with voice opportunities; our account suggests those spaces may be of smaller states’ own making.

It has been said that the northern nations of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Iceland, personify unity within diversity.

Ties of ethnographic and cultural kinship give these northern peoples a sense of unity and a desire for working together. At the same time, the varying outlooks and aspirations which the five countries have come to hold as a result of their differing geographic, economic and political conditions and experiences, have produced a strong desire for independence and the preservation of their own ways of life.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the perspectives which govern the opinions of French leaders toward the United Nations. Having identified these perspectives, we shall seek to characterize the differences between them in terms of their motivation, content, and outcome. Our objective is to qualify conventional stereotypes that have been more repeated than investigated, such as that “the French” are hostile to the UN because they are “nationalists”. While traditional nationalism is still a powerful political emotion in France, it is expressed in various ways among contemporary Frenchmen. The varieties of French nationalism today include—and the paradox is more apparent than real—both commitments to internationalism and loyalties to supranationalism.

The twentieth session of the Contracting Parties to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was held at Geneva from October 23 to November 16, 1962. The Contracting Parties decided to convene a ministerial meeting in the early part of 1963 to consider a program for effective liberalization and expansion of trade in both primary and secondary products. In this connection, full weight would be attached to the importance and urgency of negotiating solutions to the problems of trade in primary products and to the additional trade problems of less developed countries. The proposal that such a meeting should be held was made jointly by the governments of the United States and Canada.

The European Parliamentary Assembly met in ordinary session from October 21 to 24, 1958, at the House of Europe in Strasbourg. After M. Robert Schuman, President of the Assembly, had opened the proceedings, statements were made on the activities of the European Economic Community (EEC or common market) during the first nine months of its existence and on the activities of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom). In regard to the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the Assembly heard a statement by M. Pierre Wigny, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Belgium, in which he noted the present coal crisis in Europe, and the differences between the common market and the free trade area—the one aiming for progressive integration, the other only for facilitating trade. This speaker was followed by M. Paul Finet, President of the High Authority of ECSC, who set out the present situation concerning coal in the common market area. He stated that the situation was undeniably serious and pointed out that pithead stocks had more than trebled, rising from 7 million metric tons in 1957 to 22 million tons in 1958. Belgium and Germany had been particularly hard-hit. He reviewed the action taken by the High Authority in trying to make the marketing rules more flexible and to stabilize production and imports, and appealed to the Parliament for support in these proposals, which had been made to the Council of Ministers of ECSC. A debate ensued on the general subject of the European communities.

Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East: The fifteenth session of the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) was held in Broadbeach, Australia, from March 9 to 19, 1959, under the chairmanship of Mr. Richard G. Casey, Minister of State for External Affairs of Australia.1 During the course of the session, new offers of financial aid to the Lower Mekong river development project were made: Canada offered $1,300,000 to pay for its undertaking of an aerial survey and mapping of the Lower Mekong basin; Australia offered $225,000 for equipment and training; and France promised an additional $102,500 beyond the $126,000 previously contributed. The Soviet Union also indicated that it was prepared to extend technical assistance to the Mekong project either directly or through ECAFE for power stations.

Provisional Organ of Consultation: The Organization of American States (OAS) Council met on April 28, 1963, acting as the Provisional Organ of Consultation under the terms of Article 6 of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (Rio Treaty), to discuss the tense situation existing between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The immediate cause of the situation was cited as the alleged Haitian violations of the premises of the Dominican Embassy in Port-au-Prince. These violations were denied by the government of Haiti. The Provisional Organ of Consultation authorized the Chairman to appoint a five-man fact-finding committee to visit the scene and submit a report. It also resolved to request the two governments involved to guarantee fully that they would abstain from taking any act susceptible of aggravating the situation between them or that might breach the international peace.