THE WORLD'S LAST HOPE
T is significant, and a little discouraging, that the fact that the I Preparatory Committee of the United Nations Organisation has for some time been in session in London is, in the midst of other preoccupations, going almost unnoticed. The machinery that has been set in motion ought not to escape public attention, even if most of its operation is, rightly or wrongly, withdrawn froth the public gaze. For something of incalculable importance to the human race has begun to happen. The work initiated at Dumbarton Oaks last autumn was completed, so far as the drafting of a consti- tution is concerned, at San Francisco in June, when the repre- sentatives of _fifty nations unanimously adopted a Charter of one hundred and eleven clauses, comprising an agreement whereby every signatory undertook. to abstain from war or threat of war and to unite to repress, by armed action if necessary, any State attempting such violation of the peace. The Charter is not yet in force ; for that its ratification by the five permanent members of its Security Council, together with half the other members of the Organisation, is necessary, and though the permanent five, led by the United States of America, have done their part, The remaining twenty-three ratifications are not yet all in. That, however, is a matter only of weeks. It certaiply will not delay the Preparatory Committee, whose business it is to work out various details, and make recommendations on some queStions which involve much more than detail, to clear the ground for the first meeting of the General Assembly of the Organisation in the early part of next year. That date is not far distant, and it is high time the public as well as the Governments of the States that brought the new organisation into being should develop views of their own on the problems to be faced and the right way to face them.
Mankind progresses habitually through trial and error, and it is inevitable that comparison should be made between the process of building the United Nations in '945 and that of building the League of Nations in 1919. The comparison need not be pressed beyond a point, but there are some lessons that must not be missed. States great and small, remembering, not how the League failed but how they failed the League, have resolved that lack of military resources shall not be a cause of failure again ; a Security Council, a Military Staff Committee and national air force contingents held immediately available at the Council's disposal will give the United Nations compulsive powers such as the League never commanded. So it seemed, at least, in June, six weeks before the atomic bomb revolutionised the whole conception of future warfare. What will be done about the bomb, how far, if at all, its secret will be shared, are important and still unanswered questions ; for the moment President Truman is plainly right in leaving matters where they are till the Security Council, which is not yet in being, can discuss the whole problem. But to argue that the coming of the bomb has reduced the work accomplished at San Francisco to futility is folly of a particularly pernicious order. If the warfare of the future is to be warfare by atomic bombs and rockets of unimagined range and potency, then it is tenfold and a hundredfold more urgent that warfare shall be ended and the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki be the last used in battle in the world's history. That is what the United Nations is created to effect, and failure to effect it means the doom of humanity. Here alone is reason why the whole of humanity should resolve, with an intensity of resolution never con- ceived of before, that the United Nations shall not fail nor even for a moment look like falling.
But the conditions of success are exacting. Caution is needed as a driving force and wisdom as a guide. Patience in negotiation must be combined with tolerance for other signatories' apparent unreasonableness and a readintss to compromise on lesser issues as the price of agreement on greater. No doubt the negotiators already at work in London, Mr. Stettinius and Mr. Noel-Baker, Dr. Wellington Koo and the rest, are completely conscious of that. No doubt they are conscious equally that while their busi- ness is to construct machinery, it is no; machinery but the spirit animating the men who drive the machinery that must save the world. Yet the machinery is of great importance, and at this particular juncture it holds the foreground. This is the moment when disagreements may arise and mistakes may be made or avoided. Some foretaste of future difficulties was provided at San Francisco. One, perhaps the greatest, is the dissatisfaction of the lesser States at the oligarchic powers assumed by the five per- manent members of the Security Council, Great Britain, the United States, France, Russia and China. The reason for their predominance is plain ; authority must reside where power resides ; but that predominance will be less pronounced when the six non- permanent members of the Council have been elected by the Assembly and the whole body of eleven sets about its work, as no doubt it will, with no undue sense of inequality between the six and the five ; Mr. Bevin, moreover, has pointed out that in the vexed question of voting and veto the privileges attaching to the five are less marked than has been popularly supposed. One desirable development is the admission of neutral States. It would be well, indeed, if one at least of them were given a place on the Council. So far from perpetuating a war-time alliance of victorious belligerents, the United Nations must, so far as possible, make a clean break with war. Let the Allied Powers, as Allied Powers, clear up the debris of war ; as individual States united to end war they must, in common with what few neutrals are available, set about the far greater task of building up the fabric of peace. In that the neutrals may be rather symbols than indispensable adjuncts, but the value of symbols is not to be belittled.
There is a certain symbolism, indeed, as well as immense practical importance, in the whole conception of the United Nations, with its General Assembly, its Security Council and Secretariat, its Social and Economic Council, its Trusteeship Council, its Permanent Court of International Justice, with ancillary bodies like the International Labour Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the International Bank and International Monetary Fund, all associated with it in a relationship not yet precisely defined. Here is a great instrument not indeed of inter- national government but of international executive action, out of which may evolve, on the sound solvitur ambulando principle, a variety of closer forms of association, both universal and regional. But the voyage will not be all smooth. There is ample scope for initial differences and rivalries. The choice of a Secretary-General, and the appointment by the Secretary-General of his staff, will involve decisions by which the whole future of the Organisation will be determined. To build up a great international civil service of men and women from more than fifty nations, pledged to put the interests of the Organisation even before loyalty to their own countries, is a vast and formidable undertaking. It can be done. It was done with a large measure of success at Geneva. But at Geneva Governments were constantly endeavouring to push nominees of their own into key-positions in the heart of the international organisation for their own ends. That tendency must be resisted to the utmost, and the British Government has declared itself alive to the danger. After considerable discussion an im- portant principle was vindicated at San Francisco, in the decision that the staff shall be appointed by the Secretary-General and that the paramount qualifications shall be efficiency, competence and integrity, with national self-interest excluded altogether.
The scat of the Organisation is a matter of some psychological as well as practical importance. There w:11 he fine to discuss that in detail later. Meanwhile, it is only necessary to emphasise the danger of any manifestations of rivalry as, for example, between Europe and America ; the only consideration that should have weight, apart from questions of accommodation and accessibility, is the greatest good and the greatest convenience of the greatest number of States. That will no doubt be settled amicably. So will other matters. The essential machinery will be completed. Then will come the need, and the opportunity, for the greatest factor of all, the driving force of a united and resolute public opinion in every country. That opinion is shaping itself—in the United States, in Britain, in many of the smaller States. Our own Government is alive to its importance. Mr. Bevin in the House of Commons expressed the wish that the main items of the United Nations Charter could be displayed in some suitable form in every church, every hall, every trade union branch, every place in the country where the public assembles. That is the right spirit. What is needed is not a tepid hope that the New League will succeed, but a burning conviction that at all costs it must succeed. Our power to create that conviction in other countries is limited. Nothing hinders us from kindling it to a flame in our own.
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