The British Commonwealth of Nations and the United Nations have today at least one thing in common, namely, that each faces a crisis so serious as to threaten its very survival. Nor are the reasons for the crises so very different. In part they stem from the nature of the two institutions. Both are associations of sovereign states, each one of which views the Commonwealth or United Nations relationship as only one strand–and only rarely the most important strand–in a complex and variegated web of relationships.

At a meeting in Warsaw on January 19–20, 1965, the Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Treaty Organization adopted a communiqué condemning proposals for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) multilateral force (MLF). Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Rumania, and the Soviet Union were represented at the meeting by their respective Prime Ministers and Foreign and Defense Ministers and by the First Secretaries of their Communist Parties. Albania, although invited, did not send a delegation on the ground that the meeting had been convened without prior consultation.

When French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand proposed in 1929 to establish “a sort of federal bond” between the European members of the League of Nations, these states numbered 27 out of a total membership of 60. Today the United Nations has a membership of 114 states of which 23 are European. Of these 23 states, seven are popular democracies. (The Soviet Union, a special case, is not included in this calculation.) There remain sixteen countries extending in the form of a crescent from Finland to Ireland to France and from Portugal to Turkey which are part of the “free” or “Western world.” The conclusion is obvious. The League of Nations was dominated by Europeans who furthermore controlled a large part of the overseas world in the form of colonies, protectorates, and mandates. The United Nations, where the major influence, linked to power, is exerted by the United States and the Soviet Union, is dominated by non-Europeans. This non-European domination—political, psychological, and moral—is the fundamental phenomenon, and it is the subject of this study.

When the governments of the Latin American states were taking part in the negotiations leading to the founding of the UN, they could hardly have done so with nostalgic memories of the League of Nations. The League had provided no protection to the Caribbean countries from interventions by the United States, and, largely because of United States protests, it did not consider the Tacna-Arica and Costa Rica-Panama disputes in the early 1920's. Furthermore, Mexico had not been invited to join; Brazil withdrew in 1926; and Argentina and Peru took little part in League affairs. The organization was regarded as being run mainly for the benefit of European states with the aid of what Latin Americans called an “international bureaucracy,” in which citizens from the southern hemisphere played minor roles. The United States was, of course, not a member, and both the reference to the Monroe Doctrine by name in Article 21 of the Covenant and the organization's practice of shunning any attempt to interfere in inter-American affairs against the wishes of the United States made the League in its first decade a remote and inefficacious institution to countries that were seriously concerned about domination by Washington.

In terms of the opening phrase of the Charter of the United Nations—“We the peoples of the United Nations”—the dominant image which comes to mind is that of Asia. Though not all the countries of Asia are Members of the United Nations—notably Korea, Vietnam, and now Indonesia—the Asian peoples of the United Nations (including the Chinese) not only greatly exceed in numbers those from any of the other major areas of the world but considerably outnumber all the peoples from these areas taken together.

In the first dozen years of the UN's existence Middle East disputes came before the Security Council and appeared on the agenda of the General Assembly with greater frequency than did disputes in any other region of the world. Thereafter the Middle East did not always occupy the center of the UN's peacekeeping stage. Yet as recent developments in the Arab-Israeli area and in Cyprus and Yemen disclose, the Middle East remains a region of deep restiveness that continues to threaten world peace and security. Every regular session of the General Assembly, except the first session in 1946, has considered Middle East items. Two special sessions dealt with the Palestine problem, and two emergency sessions handled the Suez and Lebanese crises. The Security Council has turned to the Palestine problem or its lineal descendant, the Arab-Israeli dispute, at approximately every sixth meeting.

At the beginning of its nineteenth session the General Assembly of the United Nations decided by acclamation that Alex Quaison-Sackey, the permanent representative of Ghana, should preside over the session. This was only the second time in eighteen years that this, the highest honor in the Organization, was accorded to a representative of an African state, and the first time that a Negro African was thus chosen.

Only six of the small states of Western or Western oriented Europe participated in the United Nations Conference on International Organization at San Francisco. They were Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Norway, Luxembourg, and, after a struggle between the Soviet Union and its wartime allies, Denmark. Their participation followed, for the most part, the model of the “honorable, independent, disinterested small state”: sober, responsible, speaking mainly when spoken to, but assiduously seeking out ways to make their voices heard in the alleviation of international conflict. True, they were there as part of the winning coalition in World War II and shared the hopes and expectations of the larger Western powers concerning the role of the United Nations. But they joined similar countries outside Europe, particularly Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, in helping to shape a UN Charter which in certain ways differed from the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals. The role of the General Assembly was, for example, enlarged, thus modifying the special position of the Great Powers, and the scope of the United Nations in economic and social fields was expanded. The influence of the small states in Europe stemmed from the desire of the major Western allies, particularly the United States, to ensure the success of the enterprise by concessions to those whose participation would be necessary to make it a worthwhile undertaking.

Old soldiers may “just fade away” as General Douglas MacArthur reminded us, but the controversy over the relative merits of regionalism and globalism in international organization will ever be with us. That question generated as much heat as any other issue at San Francisco in 1945 with the possible exception of the veto. In more recent years the inadequacies of the United Nations, the changing nature of the Cold War, the growth and expansion of regional organizations, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the continued shrinking of the universe have kept the heat of this controversy at a relatively high level.

It may be unthinkable, even unimaginable, that the United Nations could itself become a true “community” in the near future. It is not unthinkable that the UN may be pushing the present disarray a little closer to that goal. The popular press abounds with loose references to the “world community,” but men who have thought deeply and hardheadedly about this prospect have also hinted in that direction, using various terms for the same thing. To quote only two, Lincoln P. Bloomfield calmly mentions “the universal society of which the United Nations is the forerunner” and Richard N. Gardner believes that a “genuine world community is waiting to be born. …”

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.

Undertaking to write about the future of the United Nations may well be regarded as a risky if not a downright foolhardy enterprise, particularly in 1965, between the tragicomedy of the nineteenth General Assembly and the great uncertainty of the twentieth session. For many people, the question is whether the United Nations has a future, and for some of them this question is purely rhetorical. I think that it has, or that, at any rate, general international organization has a future. Whatever may happen to the United Nations, I find it difficult to conceive that the men who conduct the foreign relations of states will ever again consider that they can dispense with a comprehensive institutional mechanism or that they will, in the foreseeable future, contrive a global mechanism fundamentally different in character from the United Nations. Objectively, the operation of the international system requires an organizational framework virtually coextensive with the system; just as education requires schools and universities and medicine requires hospitals and clinics, so international relations require at least as much organizational apparatus as the United Nations system provides. Moreover, there is evidence that this objective need has penetrated the consciousness of most statesmen. The questions that they have asked about international organization in the last twenty years have not included the question of whether it is sensible to equip the international system with a general institutional structure.