From this introduction I may have given you the impression that I am about to produce some sensational revelations about the inner workings of the United Nations. This is not so. In what follows I shall be doing no more, for the most part, than presenting and reasoning from some of the assumptions about the facts of international life at the United Nations which are habitually made by those who work there, whether in the delegations or in the Secretariat. I refer to the assumptions which they make while they are actually working, as distinct from those which spring almost unbidden to their lips when they are addressing outside audiences in their American environment, or in their puzzled homelands.
The first working assumption, which every professional makes, and few professionals publicly refer to, is that if the United States does not want a given course of action to be taken, then the United Nations—that is to say the Security Council, the General Assembly and the Secretariat—will refrain from taking that course of action. The same assumption is not made about any of the other permanent members except in function of their degree of influence, at a given moment, with the United States. The second assumption, the converse of the first, is that any action taken by the United Nations must fit in with the United States’ estimate of its own diplomatic interests. The third assumption is the corollary, that extensions of the power and influence of the United Nations are likely to be more at the expense of the Soviet Union and its allies than of the other sovereign members. The fourth is that the United Nations is unlikely to encroach on the interests of America’s allies, unless it should be expedient, on a wider view of American interests, for the United States to permit the United Nations to do so. The fifth assumption is that if, in the judgment of the State Department, it is expedient to sacrifice the real or supposed immediate interests of any of America’s allies, for the strengthening of America’s over-all diplomatic position, then the United Nations is likely to act in a manner disrespectful to these particular allies and their interests.
Up to 1958, the sixth assumption—nay, the first assumption—would have been that any proposition which the United States desired would become United Nations policy. By 1958, however, at the time of the Lebanon crisis, it became apparent that because of the intake of new members, the United States could no longer carry through any proposition which ran flagrantly counter to Afro-Asian opinion, as a whole. The new sixth assumption then emerged: that any proposition on which the United States and a considerable number of Afro-Asian states can agree will become United Nations policy. This sixth assumption has now become a cardinal one, for practical prognosis, as distinct from academic speculation, about United Nations activity. Major propositions which are intended to be carried are now invariably worked out between the United States and at least some African and Asian delegates before coming to the floor. Naturally other consultations also take place, but the critical ones, as far as voting is concerned, are between the United States and the Afro-Asians. Both the Soviet Union and the Western European powers are, for different reasons, very reluctant to oppose openly a solid American-Afro-Asian consensus, although they will usually strive hard, at different ends, to prevent such a consensus coming into being. This new sixth assumption does differ significantly from the old one, whereby American control over the United Nations was virtually complete. The shift is healthy as far as it goes, in that it encourages the development of real negotiations, instead of pure propaganda demonstrations at the United Nations.*
The gap, however, between the two assumptions is not quite so great as one might at first suppose, and this for two reasons. The first is that the United States, through its widespread network of diplomatic and technical aid missions, and the pervasive influence of its great financial, commercial and industrial corporations, has a considerable and probably an increasing say in the foreign policies of a number of Asian and African governments. The second is that the Asian and African countries by no means form a solid bloc and it is therefore possible for the United States to acquire the necessary accession of Afro-Asian votes for one phase of its policy from one end of the spectrum, and for another phase from the other end. Thus, to take a recent example, the United States, in supporting and deciding military action in Katanga, could have relied, if necessary, on the left and centre of the Afro-Asian group at the Assembly to give, together with the safe Latin American and other votes, the necessary two-thirds majority in any voting. In the second phase, when it was United States and United Nations policy, just after the end of the secession, to maintain Tshombe and his government at the head of provincial affairs in South Katanga, the United States could still, if necessary, have found a majority for this policy—but a different and somewhat more vulnerable one, the right and centre, instead of the left and centre, of the Afro-Asian group, combined with the safe votes. Thus, today, by the exercise of a sophisticated kind of parliamentary diplomacy, the United States can get almost as good results as by the cruder methods prevalent up to 1958.
I have deliberately stressed the preponderant American role at the United Nations. I have done so for the sole reason that this is a major fact of international life, well known to all professionally concerned with these matters, but often glossed over, minimized or simply ignored, in public discussion and even, or perhaps especially, in discussions of a serious academic kind. In preparing this lecture I read through a certain number of textbooks and similar writings by learned men, sometimes jurists and sometimes political scientists, often attached to, or writing for, some foundation. I was astonished by the regularity with which most of them discussed the deliberations and decisions of, for example, the General Assembly, as if that body were responsive simply to world opinion generally, without the marked specific weighting which it in fact has in favour of the State Department point of view.†
In drawing attention to this large and obvious, but relatively neglected, phenomenon it is not at all my wish to denounce the United States. Any great power which was in a position to exercise such authority in an international organization would have made use of its opportunities, and on the whole I think the other powers would have made a worse use of it than the United States has done. The United States, despite certain aberrations on Formosa and Cuba, has never—so far at least—shown the reckless disregard for the possible consequences of its actions which Britain and France showed at Suez and the Soviet Union showed in Hungary. On the whole, the United States administration handled the combined Suez-Hungary crisis through the United Nations with a caution in relation to its potential foes and a firmness in relation to its imprudent allies which were what, at the time, the interests of world peace as well as the particular interests of the United States probably demanded. Since it is more or less inevitable, in a world of unequal sovereign states, that one great power should have far greater influence in the international organization than others, humanity has probably reason to be glad that the key decisions should have been in the hands of Eisenhower and Kennedy, rather than of Eden, Guy Mollet, Macmillan, Chiang Kai-shek, de Gaulle, Stalin or Khrushchev. I might add that, of all those named, Khrushchev might well be the safest second choice.
It will, of course, be pointed out that the United States control over the United Nations is not, and never has been absolute, because of the famous Soviet veto in the Security Council: that is to say, the rule that decisions of the Security Council require the approval, or at least the acquiescence, of the five permanent members. As, in principle, decisions are taken only in the Security Council, while the General Assembly only has power to recommend, this should mean—and Stalin probably believed that it did mean—that the United Nations could never act in a way to which the Soviet Union objected. In practice, however, once the deep divergence between the blocs emerged after the war, and once it became apparent—as was the fact at that time—that the United States had a safe majority in the Assembly, it was natural and possible for the United States and its friends to build up the authority of the Assembly as against the Security Council. This trend was for
eshadowed by Warren Austin as early as October 1946, when he said: “the General Assembly wields power primarily as the voice of the conscience of the world … we foresee a great and expanding area for the General Assembly.”‡ Warren Austin’s prediction of expanding responsibility for the General Assembly came true in 1950. At that time the Truman administration had judged it expedient to resist the attempt made by the Communist government in North Korea to reunify Korea by force, and had very naturally taken advantage of an ill-advised Soviet absence from the Security Council to get its decision covered and converted into a United Nations action by the votes of its allies and supporters on the Security Council. When the hurried return of the Soviet representative to the Security Council threatened to obstruct the operation, the United States took the momentous decision of throwing the matter into the General Assembly with the “uniting for peace” resolution. The safe American majority in the General Assembly enabled the entirely American-directed action in Korea to be continued under the United Nations flag.§
In 1956, on the other hand, when Soviet troops moved into Hungary, in what seemed to many a clearer case of aggression than the Korean one, it might have been expected that the “uniting for peace” procedure would have been invoked once more to launch a new United Nations action in resistance to aggression. This was not done, nor was it ever formally proposed in the Assembly. The reason for this, of course, was that the United States, which was ready to undertake war against the North Koreans, and risk war against the Chinese, on the Korean peninsula, was not ready to risk war against the Soviet Union in Central Europe. This perfectly rational calculation found expression at the United Nations by rather devious means, and greatly increased the confusion about what the United Nations is, and what it could be. I remember myself, at the time of my own first arrival at the United Nations as junior delegate in a minor delegation, the corridor activities on the Hungarian question, which now seem rather strange in retrospect. This was before the actual armed Soviet intervention and at a time when the Nagy Government was holding out under great pressure for its new non-aligned position. At this time, before the Soviet intervention which crushed the Nagy Government, it is possible that some kind of United Nations presence in Budapest—the sending of the Secretary-General or even a group of his aides—might have induced the Soviet Union to refrain from risking a new and worse Korea; on the other hand, it might not have had that effect at all, but might have left the United Nations, and through it, the United States, in a position of moral commitment to defend Hungary even against the armed intervention of the Soviet Union. The United States Government, after no doubt a very careful assessment of the situation, decided to run no risk. The United States delegation at the United Nations, therefore—a delegation then headed by Henry Cabot Lodge—was active in the corridors in the phase before the Russian intervention, but active not in support of the Nagy Government, but against it. American aides would insistently tell one that Nagy was just as bad a Communist as Khrushchev, that the whole dispute was a falling out of thieves, that the Nagy representatives at the United Nations had an appalling Communist record and so on. It was only after the Hungarian rising had been definitely crushed, and no possibility or danger of effective United Nations and United States intervention remained, that Nagy and his colleagues came to be hailed as heroes and martyrs by the same people who had assiduously smeared them when they may have been within reach of help.
In all this, the policy of the then United States Government, that of Mr. Eisenhower and Mr. Dulles, was rationally defensible. It was rationally defensible not to run a risk of world war over Hungary, as it also was to curb, with the help of the United Nations, the simultaneous sally of rash friends at Suez. All this was quite defensible, but not on any terms which the Republican Administration could consistently and effectively use to its supporters. Mr. Dulles and his friends, after all, had promised to roll back the Iron Curtain, and when it came to the pinch they decided not to roll back, but to climb down. This was a very difficult operation, because millions of Americans, including large immigrant groups, were passionately concerned about Hungary, while those Americans who cared at all about Suez were mainly on the side of Israel, Britain and France—in that order—and detested Nasser. In these circumstances, the Republican Administration used the United Nations, and used it very ably, as a lightning conductor. It was the United Nations which, in the public legend, halted Britain and France in Suez; it was the United Nations which, in the same legend, failed to cope with Soviet aggression in Hungary. Hence the myth of the United Nations’ double standard: severe on the nations of the West and soft on communism. In actual fact, of course, what the General Assembly did in both cases was much the same—that is, it passed resolutions calling for a withdrawal of the British and French forces from Egypt, and of the Soviet forces from Hungary. If there was any double standard, it was at the expense of the Soviet Union, whose actions, unlike those of Britain and France, were stigmatized as aggressive and condemned. The British and French obeyed, not so much, one can reasonably assume, because of the voting majority in the Assembly, but because both the United States and the Soviet Union were against them and there was a risk of having to fight the Soviet Union without American support. The Soviet Union did not obey, because it well knew from the posture of the United States in the early and more critical days, and from the failure of the United States to invoke sanctions under the “uniting for peace” procedure, that the United States would not intervene in support of Hungary.
These attitudes of the powers were determined by rational, though perhaps mistaken, calculations of their own interests—which did however include, and this is important, the common interest in peace—and those of them who could so do, made use of the United Nations to mask their positions. Thus American Republican spokesmen regretted, after the event, that the United Nations had failed in the case of Hungary, and Americans forgot, if they ever realized, that if there was any failure, it was a failure of the United States Government which failed to propose sanctions and dissuaded others from doing so. Similarly, the British Government, withdrawing under Russian and American pressure from its ill-judged Suez venture, made some parade of its law-abiding deference to a decision of the United Nations and emphasized how very different its level of international morality was from that of the Russians, and how defective an instrument the United Nations was for dealing with Russia. In this way, the government of Mr. Eisenhower used the United Nations with great success, as a scapegoat, while the government of Sir Anthony Eden, with less success but still with some, used the United Nations as a means of saving what remained of its face. The peace was saved, adventures were liquidated, the public was misled.
In the United States the United Nations came to be thought of as a powerful but suspect almost supra-national body with a mysterious authority over United States policy. This illusion continues to be useful for any American government which finds it necessary to pursue a domestically unpopular line in foreign policy. The government can refer the issue to the United Nations, obtain the decision it wants, and let the United Nations shoulder the unpopularity. In Britain and France, many after Suez thought of the United Nations as a hypocritical and irresponsible mass of small nations applying a double standard and ignorantly intervening in grave matters of policy which should be reserved for experienced statesmen. This, of course, was the reaction of what is called the “wider public.”¶ Some British and French politicians, who well knew that United States policy was the main factor involved, found it more convenient to denounce the blind hysteria of the United Nations than to complain too much about the stinging and calculated rebuff administered by the senior partner in the NATO Alliance. Similarly today, Lord Home, who resents the policy which the United States has been pursuing in relation to the Congo, does not attack the United States directly, but denounces the United Nations and the supposedly irresponsible smaller powers. The United States Government, of course, perfectly understands what Lord Home is saying; the pu
blic at large does not.
Senator Robert Taft, who had in his own country a reputation for being an honest, as well as an able, man, said twelve years ago that the United States should use the United Nations as “a diplomatic weapon.”|| No spokesman of the United States Government has, I believe, used this language, but successive United States Governments have acted, and with much success, in accordance with the Taft doctrine. The major decisions of the United Nations on Iran, on Palestine, on Korea, on keeping China out of the United Nations and keeping Formosa in China’s Security Council seat, on Suez, on Hungary and on the Congo have one thing in common: they were all in line with United States government policy: in the case of the Congo, United Nations policy changed after a change of United States administration. The only partial exception I can think of is that of Lebanon, in 1958, where the Arab countries, working with the Secretariat, reached agreement, ratified by the United Nations, which fell short of what the United States delegation had hoped for at the outset of the special session in question. In reality, what Lebanon marked was the transition from a state of affairs in which the United States was the sole determinant of General Assembly decisions, to one in which it exercised predominance on condition of working together with the Afro-Asian group—the sixth assumption to which I referred earlier.** That is what the case of Lebanon represented in reality, I believe, but it represented something else in the mind of Mr. Hammarskjöld. it represented for him an important stage in the growth of the Secretariat, and especially in the office of the Secretary-General, towards independent authority in world affairs. This was the theory of the “dynamic instrument” of which Mr. Hammarskjöld often spoke.†† It is not easy to express this theory briefly, because it developed over the years in Mr. Hammarskjöld’s mind, while remaining wrapped in the translucent envelope of his prose style, but roughly speaking, the theory was this: the Secretary-General represented the general will of the international community as a whole, independent of the will of any individual member or group of members; where the other organs of the Charter, the Security Council and the General Assembly, had failed to reach agreement or, as more often happened, had reached only ambiguous agreement, the Secretary-General, and under him the Secretariat, could be, and ought to be, trusted to act in the general interest of all. In this way, and through such situations, the authority of the Secretary-General and the Secretariat were to be gradually built up in the direction, it was hoped, ultimately of a genuinely supra-national authority—a world government.
Writers and Politics Page 23