Edwin Ginn, successful publisher of educational books, philanthropist, and founder of the World Peace Foundation, gave much thought to the problem of world peace and believed that he knew the answer. He was convinced that world peace, as he understood it, was highly desirable, was attainable, and was likely to be achieved in the not too distant future. To this achievement he devoted a third of the wealth accumulated during a lifetime of demonstrated business capacity and acumen. So confident was he of the correctness of his analysis of the peace problem that he stipulated in his will the use to be made, after world peace was attained, of the fund which he provided for the support of his World Peace Foundation. His trustees were charged with the duty of recognizing the attainment of peace and then transferring the fund to the support of his other favorite philanthropy, the Charlesbank Homes, which he expected to flourish in a peaceful world.

Those of us who have lived through the growth of international organizations during the last 45 years have witnessed a remarkable series of transformations in their membership, their procedures, their authority, their effectiveness, and even in their fundamental conception, purposes, and function.

Designed to supplement the inherited and traditional political structure of the world, the League of Nations was to consist primarily of new arrangements for avoiding any repetition of the breakdown in the conduct of international relations represented by the outbreak of war in 1914. The United Nations, as originally conceived, was designed to be a central element in a political structure of a world which was recognized to be changing. But there was little appreciation, when the Charter was drafted, of how sudden, far-reaching, and decisive the changes would prove to be.

During the split second of time represented by the last few years, humanity has been bereft of five of its great leaders who were still in the midst of carrying awesome responsibilities including the promotion of peace—Jawaharlal Nehru, Pope John XXIII, John F. Kennedy, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Adlai E. Stevenson. How great the void that the passing of each of them produced! How strong our conviction that a world gripped with grave problems—old and new—needed their special gifts, their clear minds, their strong hands, their sense of devotion for a longer span of time! Yet the destiny that shapes our ends is in this sense beyond our control.

“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.

Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons is one facet of the problem of preventing nuclear war, a problem which has engaged the statesmen of the world ever since the dust of the Nagasaki explosion settled. In the Truman-Attlee-King declaration of November 15, 1945, the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and the Prime Minister of Canada proposed that the United Nations set up a commission to study how atomic energy could be controlled so as to limit its use to peaceful purposes, how atomic weapons could be eliminated from national armaments, and how safeguards could be set up so as to ensure that all nations would comply widi the obligations which they undertook to these ends. Thus fell to the United Nations one of the most intractable problems of international organization, a problem which might be looked on as the creation of a new sphere of international law.

Before entering into the substance of our subject it would be useful to define three terms which appear in this article and which bear differing connotations in the writings of political scientists working in the field of international organization. These are: integration, international secretariat, and executive action.

As the Allied troops overran the German colonies the First World War British publicists began to debate whether these territories should be returned to Germany, placed under some sort of international control, or sliced up and annexed by the conquering powers. There was little support for the proposal to hand diem back to Germany. In part this was because of the widely held belief that the Germans were guilty of “atrocities” in Africa no less appalling than those committed in King Leopold's Congo Free State before it was annexed by Belgium in 1908. The real question was whether the German colonies should be annexed or “internationalized.” On the left of the political spectrum the Independent Labor Party urged international administration as a means of uprooting imperialism as a cause of war. On the right the conservative press advocated annexation pure and simple as a means of preventing war by strengthening the British Empire. The mandates system itself was a compromise between these opposing ideas. It was viewed by those on the left as a limited triumph in the cause of internationalization; and by those on the right as annexation in all but name.

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.

Those organs of the United Nations which do not include all Member States pose a challenging problem: How should such select bodies be constituted? There is no easy solution in view of the diversity of national policies, even between countries of a particular region, ideology, or stage of development. This paper presents a series of case studies illustrating some of the principles invoked and the nature of the accommodations arrived at by the General Assembly in dealing with the problem, especially in setting up its own subsidiary organs. On the basis of this evidence an assessment is made of the significance of recent changes in the structure of these nonplenary organs and the resulting impact on the balance of decision-making power in the Organization.

Although much has been written on the attitude of new states toward international law in general, little concern has been given in contemporary literature to the attitude of these states toward the judicial machinery of international law and its principal organ, the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Writings on the new states' attitude toward international law are also, on the whole, theoretical and general in character to the extent that they could be described as analyses of what this attitude could or should be rather than what it is in fact. Typical of these writings is Brierly's statement that some of the new nations “at least are inclined to look on international law as an alien system which the Western nations, whose moral or intellectual leadership they no longer recognize, are trying to impose upon them”—an outlook which suggests at best an indifferent attitude toward the Court whose primary function is to apply this (alien) system of law. As a result, it has been said that the new states' attitude toward the Court is an indirect manifestation of their rebelliousness against the present system of international law or, at least, an example of their consciousness of the sovereignty they have recently acquired.

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.

Is it possible to integrate states into larger unions without the use of force? Should we think of a continuous “federalizing process” in which economic integration is a first step? Are there certain conditions under which economic integration of a group of nations automatically triggers political unity?

The Community of the Six owes its origin and continued success largely to the inventiveness and political astuteness of a small group of leaders, generally associated with Jean Monnet (France) and, from 1956 on, the Action Committee for the United States of Europe. The purpose of this article is to assess the strategy of Monnet and his associates and their influence on the formation and development of the three European Communities: the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), and the European Economic Community (EEC) or the Common Market.

Since the establishment of the three European Communities (the European Coal and Steel Community [ECSC] in 1952 and the European Economic Community [EEC] and the European Atomic Energy Community [Euratom] in 1958) four agreements of association with non-member states have been concluded. The first of these was signed by ECSC and the United Kingdom on December 21, 1954. The other three agreements, concluded by EEC with Greece, with a number of newly independent African states and Madagascar, and with Turkey, were signed on July 9, 1961, July 20, 1963, and September 12, 1963, respectively. During the last few years other countries in Europe and Africa have expressed a desire to become associated with EEC, and preliminary discussions that may eventually result in additional association agreements are now under way with Austria, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda. Only Euratom has so far refrained from negotiating an association agreement although the Euratom Treaty contains provisions identical to those of the EEC Treaty for the conclusion of such agreements.

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.

Events since January 1963 have confronted participant and observer alike with a number of fundamental political questions about the European Community. How can we reconcile repeated newspaper stories about its imminent collapse because of one crisis or another with its persistence and seemingly ever more impressive accomplishments? Can the Community continue to develop in the face of major policy differences among its members? Does the existence of the Community change the ground rules and operating conditions of the relations between its members, or does it only place naïve European idealists at the mercy of more cynical, wily, and “realistic” politicians by introducing merely gentler ways of coercing or cajoling the less powerful members? Does it have any enduring impact on the political process or on political attitudes within the member states, or are such changes as occur insignificant or easily reversible?

Listed below are the 114 Members of the United Nations with the dates on which they became Members of the Organization.

The Security Council held two meetings (1140th and 1141st) on August 5 and 7, 1964, to discuss a complaint of the United States government against the government of North Vietnam, which was expressed in a letter dated August 4, 1964, from the permanent representative of the United States addressed to the President of the Security Council. At the outset of the 1140th meeting on August 5, 1964, Mr. Morozov (Soviet Union) explained that he had requested the postponement of the meeting until August 6 to permit his delegation to receive necessary instructions from its government. With regard to this request, Mr. Stevenson (United States) pointed out that the UN Charter explicitly called for immediate reporting to the Council of measures taken by Members in the exercise of their right of self-defense. If the Council wished to adjourn after hearing the statement of the United States delegation, Mr. Stevenson had no objection. Mr. Hajek (Czechoslovakia) also opposed convening the meeting on August 5 on the grounds that Council members did not possess all the facts and views of the parties. To deliberate on the question on the basis of one version would not, he felt, serve the interests of the Council. Moreover, he did not feel that the circumstances constituted an emergency: The United States did not appear to be immediately threatened.

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.

The attempts which have been undertaken, primarily by specialists in international law, to define an international organization emphasize a variety of features which distinguish that social phenomenon. Some of the characteristics that have been mentioned include creation on the basis of an international agreement, the existence of a distinct personality of the organization separate from its individual members, the exhibition of a relative autonomy of will by the organs of the agency as compared with the will of the total of its members, etc. There is general agreement that an essential feature of an international organization is the possession of permanent organs; otherwise, there has so far been no consensus on the necessity for an international organization to possess any specific feature. For example, it can be demonstrated that there are no bases for particularly stressing, as a supposedly indispensable feature of such an organization, its possessing a separate personality and an autonomy of will, as is done by certain French authors.