STEPHEN SCHLESINGER Transcending or Defending the World of States? The United Nations and its Members T he United Nations came into existence in 1945 primarily as a security organization designed to prevent wars and punish aggressors. The core of the U.N . – its Security Council – was set up in such a way that the five most formidable powers of that era, Great Britain, the United States, France, Russia and China, dominated it by dint of their military might and their veto power. Through the U.N. Charter, these five nations were expected to gain a sufficient enough number of votes from the Council to impose a mandate binding on other U.N. members to undertake enforcement actions. This fairly aggressive(and in some ways undemocratic) posture was deliberately fostered in order to make the central thrust of the»security« in the Council one of compulsion rather than voluntarism. This was because the world had just endured the bloodiest conflict in human history – the Second World War, a few decades after sur­viving the other most tragic war of the 20 th cen­tury, the first World War. There was a determina­tion among the countries of the planet never to permit these sorts of horrors to happen again. The U.N. Security Council, unlike its weaker predeces­sor, the League of Nations’ Executive Council, was emphatically designed to deter or prevent such calamities. What is often forgotten, then, about the U.N. is that it was the cauldron of war, not the warm bath of peace, that conceived and shaped this organiza­tion. This is important to remember because it suggests that only an event of staggering destruc­tion, of truly memorable violence, mayhem and human loss, was able to overcome the historical resistance of nations to ceding any of their authority to a supranational organization and, in effect, surrendering a part of their national sover­eignty. But the question this immediately raised historically was: once the circumstances have dis­appeared which produced such an international body and countries no longer feel threatened, do they still need a global assembly? This is a con­undrum which is not yet resolved. Indeed, the nations of the U.N. today seesaw between the de­sire to stamp out wars and gain safety collectively, and yet maintain their separateness and own national or regional power. This is an underlying tension which has never gone away and helps explain the ambiguous response that many nations have, fifty years or so after its inception, toward the U.N. . This salient factor could be seen from the beginning at the U.N. ’s founding conference in San Francisco 1945 . At the start of the Spring 1945 meeting, one of the central controversies was the issue of the veto. The veto was demanded by the main three actors responsible for the organiza­tion’s birth – the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union – out of their concern about how they could each maintain their freedom of action from the entangling restraints of an international organization even as they supported its creation. In order to allay these misgivings, all three nations were accorded the power to bar enforcement actions if they infringed on their sovereignty(the veto authority was also later given to France and China). But, unlike the old League of Nations, no other countries received the right of veto. By the same token, the smaller powers, desirous of pro­tecting their authority within regional groupings, also insisted that the U.N. accommodate its Charter to recognize the rights of their regional pacts to serve as the forums of first resort for handling local crises before the U.N. ’s assumption of respon­sibility. Similar reservations attended the construction of other facets of the U.N. organization in 1945 . For example, the Trusteeship Council was given only limited powers to oversee decolonization, because colonial powers like Great Britain, France and the Netherlands objected to the U.N. ’s meddling with their possessions. The Economic and Social Coun­352 Schlesinger, Transcending or Defending the World of States? IPG 4/99