The Last Best Hope?
By D. W. BROGAN JUST after Mr. Lie was made Secretary-General of the United Nations, he spoke to the Norwegian Union of Students. ' For the benefit of these young and ardently idealistic men and women I agreed that "the work of the United Nations cannot be advanced without idealism, trust and faith," but I warned that we could not start the work of ,the United Nations in " a paradise of unreality—we must begin by taking things as they are ".' The warning was necessary then; it is necessary now. For the United Nations was emotionally launched in a mood of Optimism and simple faith, especially in America, a faith that, even in 1945, was excessive. Especially in America, for most Americans had come to the belief that the failure of the League of Nations had been mainly due to the refusal of the United States to join it; this was a mistake to avoid and a sin to expiate. And some of the irritation displayed in the United States with the United Nations—and with Mr. Lie— has its roots in the optimism of 1945-46, in the belief that American goodwill and support was all that the sick world needed. It was forgotten that if it takes two to make a quarrel (it doesn't in fact), it still more takes two to make peace. On our side of the Atlantic, the illusions were more complicated and less deep-seated. We saw the importance of American adherence; many of us believed, with a simple faith that would be astonishing now if it were not still lively in many breasts, that the USSR, in adhering to the San Francisco charter, was giving proof of a common understanding with s war-time allies, that together the United States, the Soviet and the other ' victorious ' powers would combine to build a world of peace and economic and social progress. From the beginning, or almost from the beginning, these hopes were falsified; the United Nations did not become a common instrument for pacifying a tormented world; it did not become the nucleus of a world government; it became and has remained a world forum and an agency of negotiation in cases where the great powers are not concerned or come to some agreement for private reasons of their own. The United Nations started under a shadow, the shadow of the atom bomb. Logically, the bomb made the need for an international organ- isation greater than ever; it made the case for world government more plausible than ever; at any rate it made the need for it more evident. Perhaps a turning-point in the history of the United Nations was the rejection of the Baruch plan, but that rejection was involved in the whole pattern of Soviet policy and in the fact that the Soviet Government had good hopes of destroying the American monopoly and acquiring superiority in • unconventional ' -weapons, a superiority which it may now have and which we can be certain it will not surrender. It was against a background already grey and, had all the facts been known, already worse than grey, that Mr. Lie took Office. Even his election showed the rift in the lute, for it was taken as a defeat for the United States and as a victory for the Soviet Union. Indeed, Mr. Lie was the object of repeated American criticism and suspicion until he was ` cleared ' by being denounced as a lackey of American imperialism after his action on the news of the invasion of South Korea.
We already have a good many books on the United Nations but none which make the problems of the organisation (and its achievements) so real. Mr. Lie, from the beginning, saw his post as quite different from that occupied under the League of 'Nations by Sir Eric Drummond. He was not to be a discreet higher civil servant, operating on policy matters, if at all, behind the scenes. He established his right to speak, to act, to propose action as an independent force. He had, one might say, a foreign policy for the United Nations not identical with that of any of the member states. This inevitably got him into trouble, first with one side„ then with another.
• In the Cause of Peace: Seven Years with the United Nadons. By Trygve Lie. (New York: Tho Macmillan Company, 35s.)
Some of the mast interesting and most revealing parts of this most revealing book* deal just with the actions and reactions of the great powers to the policy of the Secretary-General. His frequent trips to Moscow, London, Prague, disconcerted some governments. What seemed to Mr. Lie the most straight- forward and obvious carrying out of his duty seemed to others interference and partisanship. Naturally, Mr. Lie observes a good deal of discretion, but it is obvious that Mr. Ernest Bevin gave him almost as much trouble as Comrades Molotov and Vyshinsky. It is also obvious that the British policy of scuttle in 'Palestine shocked him, as well it might; there have been few, if any, more shameful episodes in modern British history, the chief victims being Mr. Bevin's protégés, the Palestinian Arabs. It seems to me very hard to defend Bevin's policy; but in all his accounts of the Palestine imbroglio, Mr. Lie's sympathies are not only obviously with the Zionists, but one would not gather that there was any case at all for the Arabs.
There is no reference, for example, to the effects on American policy of American politics. And since Mr. Lie is a most determined enemy of imperialism, it is odd that he does not see that, to the Arabs, Zionism is imperialism. I have no doubt at all that the Jews are making a much ,better economic and social use of Palestine than the Arabs would in any foreseeable future, but that is true of other areas of the Arab world too.
Mr. Lie has not much that is new or unknown to say of the general questions of policy that hampered and almost wrecked the United Nations. He does not see all the faults, even of manners, as being on one side. He regrets the ease with which Mr. Bevin ` rose' to Mr. Vyshinsky and he conceals any high opinion of Mr. Byrnes as Secretary of State that he may have formed. (The account of the rewarding of a friend of President Truman and Secretary Byrnes with a very high post in the new organisation's hierarchy has its comic side; it is an addition to the history of the spoils system.) Action, or rather inaction, by Mr. Byrnes led to a situation that distressed Mr. Lie in the last years of his secretaryship. The American Government refused to help the new organisation in ' evaluating ' the American candidates for jobs. Mr. Lie is quite clear on a principle that will shock many of our forward-lookers. He holds that an American Communist cannot be a good international civil servant. I agree with him. He also holds that an international civil servant who takes refuge behind the fifth amendment and refuses to answer questions put to him by a 'legally constituted body of his own country, is unfit to be an international civil servant from whom standards of political objectivity can reasonably be demanded that are not necessarily applicable to a private person. But the wave of denunciations, attacks, insinuations, which led, Mr. Lie thinks, to the suicide of his devoted aide, Abe Feller, filled him with horror, and he asks more in alarm than in sorrow, why America has gone mad on security, why the search under the bed for traitors should be carried on so much more hysterically in the United States than in Norway which has a proportionately much bigger Communist Party and has a common frontier with the Soviet Union.
His sketches of his aides, Commander Jackson, Ralph Bunche, William Stoneman, as of Stalin, the odious Czech CoMmunist bosses, Marshal Tito, are well worth noting, and the difficulties of creating an international body are made manifest again and again. Convinced that New York is the right place for the headquarters, Mr. Lie does not reflect, in public at any rate, on the question of whether the debates in the Assembly have not suffered from being held in that rather neurotic city, whether putting the headquarters in the United States, and not, say, in Canada, was not an error from the beginning. And for the future of the United Nations ? Mr. Lie believes that it is worse than idle to dream of a world govern- ment but that it is not idle to think hard and seriously about revising the charter. He has some shrewd suggestions about what can be done as well as what should be done and he makes persuasive his belief that the United Nations has deserved well of its founders and that if the simple faith of 1945 has been deceived, the fault has been less in the charter or in the interpretation of it (although some of its provisions have not even been tried), but in a world situation in which Communist dogmatism and ambition is the greatest but not the only sinner.
Previous page
