A U.N.O. DIARY
By A DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENT
THIS week the United Nations winds up the initial phase of its collective existence. As a legal, body it came into being in the autumn of last year, when the last formal ratification of its Charter was deposited with the Government of the United States. As a practical working body it began life just over a month ago, on January loth, when the newly-elected President of die General Assembly, M. Paul-Henri Spaak, of Belgium, announced to that crowded first meeting at Central Hall, Westminster, that "the first part of the first session of the General Assembly is now in session." Some time between now—the moment these notes are being written —and the beginning of next week, M. Spaak will announce that "the first part of the first session of the General Assembly is now ended," or words to that effect. And the fall of his gavel will mean that the world's second attempt at the construction of an inter- national system for collective security and co-operative prosperity is fairly launched. It would be too easy to dismiss this episode with the journalistic adjective "historic."
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Sitting in the Press Gallery, looking down at the shining pate of the interpreter mouthing his way through the latest speech from one of the 279 men (or women) officially listed as delegates represent- ing the fifty-one sovereign Governments of the United Nations, and trying to review in one's mind what those 279 have said and done during the past month, one finds this a very difficult question to answer. A great deal of solid work—of the kind that doesn't make headlines in four-page newspapers—has been accomplished. On several. major issues sharp cleavages of opinion have developed, which in one or two cases have had to be resolved by what look like rather unstable and unsatisfactory compromises which may return to plague their makers. External political issues which have little to do with the real work in hand have obtruded themselves, especially in the Security Council, and have tended to obstruct progress. But in the main, and considering the circumstances, one may say that at least a good start has been made. Whether historians of the future will label this meeting "historic" depends rather on future history itself than upon what has actually happened at Central Hall and Church House during the past month.
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Perhaps the simplest way of summing up is to take the six major bodies of which the new world organisation is composed, and see what progress each has made. They are : the General Assembly it- self, the Security Council, the Economic' and Social Council,. the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice and the Secretariat. First, the General Assembly. For the purposes of this meeting, the function of the Assembly has been largely genera- tive. From the Assembly had to spring all the other bodies con- templated in the Charter, for the Charter has entrusted to it the authority to create them. In the course of a month it has adopted resolutions and recommendations and carried out the elections to constitute all those bodies except the Trusteeship Council. It has approved the choice of Mr. Trygve .Lie, the Norwegian Foreign Minister, who has been nominated by the Security Council, as Secretary-General, and by sanctioning a number of detailed recam- mendations, already formulated by the Preparatory Commission, concerning the organisation, staffing and recruitment of the Secre- tariat, has given him the authority and powers to build up the inter- national civil service upon whose efficient and loyal functioning so much will depend for the future success of the organisation.
* * * * Next, the Security Council. Here judgement must be much more tentative. The blame for this can hardly be laid upon the Council itself, nor upon the fundamental conception of its purposes and functions as laid down by the framers of the Charter. Before it had in opportunity to organise itself properly for its work, before it had any agreed body of detailed rules of procedure to guide it, it was called upon to cope with no less than four of the thorniest international political, situations now bedevilling the relationships of the Great Powers. In the circumstances, this was asking altogether too much of any eleven men, were they Solons every one, and the wonder is not that they have coped on the whole creditably, but that they have coped at all. This is the more true in view of the paralysing blow struck at the Council's ability to make clear-cut dbcisions by Mr. Vishinsky's threat to use the veto in the Greek case. The desire of most of the members to avoid being forced to decide on an interpretation of the complexities of the veto article of the Charter in the context of a dispute between two of its Great- Power permanent members, and in the over-heated atmosphere generated by the acrid polemics on both sides, was entirely under- standable. It seemed to them wiser to defer interpretation until it could be discussed calmly as a matter of general principle, without reference to action to be taken by the Council in a particular case. Perhaps they were right. Time will tell. But there can be no doubt that, until this question of how the veto power is to be used is cleared up, the Council's approach to political controversies will be necessarily tentative and cautious.
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While the Security Council has been under the full glare of publicity and making the headlines every day, the Economic and Social Council has been labouring quietly under the guidance of its Indian President, Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar, whose brilliant work at San Francisco, in the Preparatory Commission, and in this Assembly has made him one of the outstanding figures of the new organisation. The scope of the Economic and Social Council is at once so wide and so difficult to define that reporting on its accom- plishments is so far an elusive task. It has organised itself ; it has debated in general terms how it shall set about its work ; it has been authorised by the Assembly to set up several commissions to study and make recommendations on major social and economic problems, such as the control of narcotic drugs, full employment, migration and population movements and human rights. It is con- sidering the calling of international conferences on trade and health, with a view to setting up international agencies in those fields. It is beginning the complex task of co-ordinating its relations with the other international bodies, called in the language of the Charter the "specialised agencies," such as the Food and Agriculture Organi- sation, the International Bank and Monetary Fund, the European Central Inland Transport Organisation and others.
* * * * The International Court of Justice, whose Statute had been already agreed at San Francisco, has come into being with the election by the Assembly last week of its bench of fifteen judges, and should be able to take over from the old Permanent Court and start functioning at The Hague within a reasonable time. The for- mation of the Trusteeship Council has been the subject of long debate, both in the Preparatory Commission and in the Assembly Committee, owing to the conflict of views over how the trusteeship- provisions of the Charter are to be interpreted. But as the manda- tory States have declared their intention of framing the necessary trusteeship agreements, it has been decided that these agreements should be presented to the next session of the Assembly in September, after which the Trusteeship Council can come into being. * * * * That is a very brief and sketchy outline of the main accomplish- ments of this first part of the first session of the General Assembly and of the other organs of the United Nations which it has set up. Much of it is necessarily accomplishment on paper only, and how much of it can be translated into practical achievement will depend mainly on two things—the quality and the devotion of the inter- national secretariat which it is Mr. Lie's task to recruit and the loyalty with which the fifty-one member Governments of the United Nations carry out all the manifold commitments they have assumed by concurrence in the resolutions and recommendations passed by the Assembly. Much has been achieved, but—how much more remains to be done!
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