The Machin and All That

By BRIAN CROZIER

SOME people still believe in fairies and the United Nations. Our Prime Minister, to judge from his speeches, is one; and in this respect, at least, his approach is curiously less realistic than was Sir Alec's, or if not less realistic, then de- cidedly less frank. Right-thinking left-wingers do, of course, expect of their leaders at least a genu- flexion in the direction of Manhattan's great matchbox slab and could get restless if it were not done and seen to be done. It is not enough to be against sin: one must say so publicly.

There are those, on the other hand, who favour sin and say so. The author of Justine was one, and if being against the UN as it now is appears to place one in the Marquis de Sade's company, at least one may plead that the UN has become, politically speaking, a most sinful place. Perhaps, indeed, it always has been, but so bawdy a final outcome as the degrading spectacle of a para- lysed General Assembly trying to fill vacancies for an inert Security Council at the year's , end can hardly have been part of the vision the Founding Fathers had.

How could it be, this monstrous misshapen giant, feeble at the joints and empty in the pockets, this organic Shiva sprouting a century- not-out of members, some strong, sturdy and uncooperative, others meagre, undersized and defiant? What, in fact, did they want, those war- time allies, gathered in San Francisco in 1945 and already aware, no doubt, of the imper- manence of their friendship? It is hard, by a mere reading of the Charter today, nearly twenty years after, to reconstruct their mental processes. Mr. Brian Urquhart argues* that the provisions of Chapter VII for military forces to be put at the disposal of the Security Council 'were based on an assumption, the continuing unanimity of the powers which had won the Second World War, which quickly proved to be illusory.' But the Security Council's rule of unanimity (i.e., the veto) was surely based on the assumption that the war-time unity would not last. And it is doubtful whether the powers would have agreed to the provision for military forces had they not * THE EVOLUTION Of THE UNITED NATIONS. Report

of a student seminar. Edited by G. R. Bunting and M. J. Lee. (Pergamon Press, 7s. 6d.)

t UNITED NATIONS FORCES. By D. W. Bowett. (Stevens, £5 10s.)

Longmans, 30s.

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITED NATIONS and THE SECRETARIAT OF THE UNITED NATIONS. By Sydney D. Bailey. (Revised editions, Pall Mall, 45s. and 2Is. respectively.)

iFaber. 48s. 6d.

known that the veto would let them out when the time came.

Understandably, then, the time never did come. Since the UN's own security system remained a dead letter, member-states put their faith in regional defence pacts. As Kenneth Younger points out,* the drafting of Article 51, under which these pacts were signed, amounted to a vote of no confidence in the Security Council, in advance of hypothetical occasions.

If, as Mr. Urquhart says, peace-keeping is the basic function of the United Nations, it has been, over the years, quite remarkably, unsuccessful. Its intervention in Korea was the fortuitous out- come of a Soviet boycott of the Security Council. The great powers involved in truly deadly crises, over Berlin and Cuba, have understandably kept the UN out of it, reducing their fevers without its help. True, the UN played useful subsidiary roles in winding up the Cuban affair and facili- tating Sukarno's grab of West New Guinea—a service he has now rewarded by pulling Indonesia out of the UN. On the other hand, it neither prevented Nasser from building up his forces in the Yemen (in pursuance of a brand of imperialism to which the UN's present majority would deny the name) nor kept the aggressing Chinese from hurling underclad Indian de- fenders down from Himalayan heights. Nor does the prospect of a second Communist great power veto in the Security Council sup- port the view that Peking's admission would 'strengthen' the UN; more likely, it would be the long-delayed kiss of death. For that matter, on the three major occasions when Peking's presence at the conference table was necessary—at Pan- munjom between 1951 and 1953 and at Geneva in 1954 and 1962--its absence from the UN neither prevented the negotiations nor affected their out- come. And those who argue, as the Guardian has done lately, that now China has the bomb it is more urgent than ever to bring her into the world organisation ignore the fact that the only success of consequence since the war in the whole field of disarmament and related matters—the Moscow partial test-ban treaty—was achieved outside the UN.

On the credit side, it is usual to write in the UN resolutions on Suez in 1956. This is fair up to a point. But the Security Council itself had been paralysed by the veto, this time wielded by Britain and France; and such force as the General Assembly resolutions carried was due to the fortuitous circumstance that Russia and America were, for once, on the same side of the

barricades. Moreover, it was not the .UN resolu- tions, but American financial and oil threats that stopped Eden in his tracks.

What is left on the credit side? That indiges- tible alphabet of initials, UNEF, UNFICYP, UNOGIL and the rest, by which the UN has tried to separate two groups of combatants, and which D. W. Bowett has ably defined and de- scribed? t Well yes, some of these bodies, especi- ally those on Israel's borders, do seem to have kept the temperature down, once Israel had ad- ministered the lesson she had planned to adminis- ter to surrounding Arabs. But does anyone seriously suppose UNEF will stop Nasser from flying at Israel's throat, if ever he feels his Nazi scientists have made him strong enough? Again, UNFICYP has failed disastrously in Cyprus.

And the Congo? By intervening in the Congo, it is said, the UN filled a power vacuum, pre- venting the great powers from coming to blows, and, .for good measure, kept the country going and put l'shombe in his place. What the Congo operation did, more efficiently than any of these things, was to make the UN insolvent. Today Mr. Tshombe's place is Leopoldville, one up on Elisabethville, and the Russians and Chinese are helping groups of doped cannibals with political pretensions; and to the extent that the chaos that has persisted is not total, this is due to the work of Belgian advisers, whom the UN piously ex- cluded from its operation, at least in the early stages. Hardly a success story. One of the oddest things the proliferating UN has done is to have given several dozen poverty- stricken member-states, some of them of insig- nificant population, the illusion that their voices are as important as those of the great powers. This might be less one-sidedly offensive if, say, the independent states of Kazakhstan, Uzbeki- stan, Inner Mongolia and Tibet were allowed to add their anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese voices to the current anti-western bedlam of the General Assembly, an alarming insight into which. is given by Mohamed El-Hadi Afifi .in The eleabs and the United Nations.t But this is a very remote prospect. Still odder has been the readi- ness of our governments to take such posturings seriously. De Gaulle, so wrong in some issues, is surely right to see the UN for the machin it plainly is; and his attitude doesn't appear to have cost him the friendship of his African protégés, far from it. If Mr. Callaghan is look- ing for economies to pay for Mr. Wilson's two- bob off prescriptions, he could do worse than follow the French and Russian examples and let the UN go deeper in the red.

What can be done? Simply to scrap the world organisation would be to drop some of its really valuable agencies, such as the World Health Or- ganisation and the various economic commis- sions. Perhaps, however, these could be preserved as separate. entities. Another solution might be to renegotiate the whole thing, preserving what is universally admitted to be useful and frankly recognising that the peace-keeping aspect of the operation has been a failure.

It is, of course, possible that the UN will sur- vive, or at any rate fail to die, a little longer. In that event, the books I have mentioned will be found useful for documentary purposes. So will Sydney D. Bailey's painstaking studies of the Gener.al Assembly and the Secretariat§; while John G. Stoessinger and others, in Financing the United Nations Systendi have provided a useful guide to where the money goes. Mr. Callaghan, please read. Should the organisation gasp its way out, on the other hand, this will be a serviceable colleotion of titles to place, with cautionary intent, before the peace-makers of tomorrow.