Why It Is So Tough

People were getting bored and a little impatient with the San Francisco conference. The goal--security--was so plain and good that the difficulties in drafting a charter seemed remote, artificial, vexingly technical and hard to understand.

Yet every week at San Francisco made it clearer that beneath the rivalries, the petty legalisms and the quibbling in committee rooms lay real problems related to the real world outside. The tough material which the delegates were trying to shape into a world organization had been baked hard in history's furnace. That it yielded at all to the necessities of the future was because every nation present, from Russia to Ecuador, wanted peace and recognized a United Nations organization as an indispensable instrument for getting it.

The Sovereign State. Most of the real obstacles were as obvious, as untechnical, as familiar--and as unnoticed--as household furniture.

There was the sovereign state. Every delegate represented one, and, as a public official, was sworn to uphold its sovereignty.

The old notion of sovereignty was stronger than ever. Many of the states represented at San Francisco had just been through a war in which they used unprecedented resources with unprecedented prodigality and obtained a victory which each thought of as a national achievement. Sovereignty had reached a new high on V-E day.

Secretary Stettinius in a report to the nation this week said: "The sovereignty of no nation, not even the most powerful, is absolute. There is no such thing as complete freedom of decision for any nation." Even so, sovereignty turned up every day at San Francisco. When Colombia's Alberto Lleras Camargo said that Argentina should be admitted to the conference without questioning Argentine fascism,/- he based his case on the right of a sovereign state to have any kind of government it pleased. Some of the Europeans, who knew well the connection between domestic suppression and foreign aggression, writhed in their seats.

Absolute sovereignty raised its head again when some U.S. delegates objected to part of a seemingly innocent Chinese amendment calling upon the organization to promote "educational and cultural cooperation among nations." They argued that education was the business of each sovereign state and feared that this right would be impaired if the United Nations organization were given any educational responsibilities at all. The Big Four amendments appeared with the words "educational and" deleted. Last week it took a joint lobby of agricultural, business, labor and educational organizations to get "educational and" back again.

The Veto. In some important respects, most of the small states were willing to delegate to the central organization more sovereign power than the large nations would give up. The U.S. and Russia were the only two nations which conceivably could fight the rest of the world even for a time, and these two relied for their security more upon their own armed might than upon collective action. This disparity was the origin of "the Yalta agreement on Security Council voting procedures," which for three weeks had been the key San Francisco issue.

As agreed at Yalta, the Security Council could not act if one of the Big Powers said no. Russia insisted on retaining this veto because it feared that the majority of nations on the Council would be basically unfriendly. The U.S. also wanted the veto; few politicians believed that the charter could pass the Senate without it. Critics of the veto said that it would make U.N.C.I.O. helpless in all disputes involving great powers or their friends. Veto advocates contended it was better to bow to realities than to pretend that the great powers could be covered by the world organization.

There was never any chance that the veto would be dropped or greatly modified. Realizing this, the critics asked only that the Council be empowered to investigate a dispute, and to recommend a peaceful settlement (without taking any further action), despite the veto of a Great Power. The U.S. and Britain might be willing to make these concessions if Moscow would go along.

Regions & Spheres. Of the victorious powers, only the Big Three have an industrial plant big enough and varied enough to support modern war. This sharp concentration naturally produced a tendency for other states to group themselves around the three strong ones, and for the three Great Powers to try to run things in their own regions. Because their power is naval and their vital interests are worldwide, the British are not so deeply enmeshed in "regionalism" as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union is creating a "sphere of influence" in the states along its borders. The U.S. has had its region since it had a Monroe Doctrine, rewritten and modified this year in the still highly regional Act of Chapultepec.

The Latin Americans fought hard for the recognition of "regionalism" at San Francisco. But such men as Brazil's Velloso or Cuba's Belt were not enemies of world organization. Their nations had relied so long upon the U.S. for their fundamental security that they could no more bring themselves to abandon this shield than the U.S. Congress could bring itself to shift its main reliance from the Army and the Fleet to the Security Council.

San Francisco finally surmounted the "regionalism" issue by a formula which allows regional systems to settle their own disputes, but passes responsibility to the central organization in case the regional efforts fail. Actually, no formula could erase the reality of regionalism; it remained to confront the world with the dangers of competing spheres.

Trusteeships. The organization so painfully being born in San Francisco must deal with the causes of war. Plain as midday was the fact that some of the prime causes of future war may lie in the struggling rise of what the technicians call "dependent peoples." In their millions they are discovering nationalism, industrialization, education and power.

Yet two of the Big Three depend heavily upon "dependent peoples" and areas where they live. The U.S. needs to keep some hard-won Pacific islands for military security; Britain needs other areas for both military and economic security. Russia, self-contained within its great land mass, made hay in this situation by proposing to promise the "dependent peoples" independence and, meanwhile, international control. The issue was finally narrowed down to mandated areas, old & new. A U.S. compromise, protecting Big Power control of strategic areas, preserved some remnants of the trusteeships principle, but sacrificed nothing to the principle.

The Big & the Little. Through the discussion ran the conflict between the world organization's General Assembly, which the little nations will dominate, and the Security Council, where the Big Powers with their veto will run the show.

Americans could find a certain parallel in their own Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Some of its thorniest obstacles and most brilliant compromises arose out of the difference between the little states and the big ones. But the extreme range of size and power at the Philadelphia convention was from Massachusetts down to Delaware. Between them was an easy gradation in the importance of the other eleven states.

In the San Francisco power scale, there was a drop from the U.S. and Russia to Britain; a bigger one to France and China; another to Canada, Australia and the other Middle Powers, and then an enormous drop from them to some 30 small states--the majority. These had scarcely any power, individually or collectively. The discrepancy was so great that the classic House-Senate compromise at Philadelphia offered no solution for the Big v. Little issue in world organization.

The Assembly was coming out of San Francisco with its slight power only slightly increased. The principle of equality of sovereign nations was still recognized in name only.

Against Whom? One other fundamental difficulty, unique to world organization, underlay San Francisco's travail: it had nothing to organize against. The U.S. Constitution probably would not have been adopted had it not provided "for the common defense" against outside enemies. All human groups are held together partly by external pressure. After World War II, the Axis nations would not serve this important purpose for the world at large; their control was reserved to the Big Powers alone. Last week a conference committee decided that the organization would not even have ex-members; the charter would not mention expulsion. Every real danger which the San Francisco charter makers dealt with came from inside the world organization.

Under the Trees. Each obstacle underlined the necessity of success. One afternoon the delegates left their complexities on the tables, went over to the Muir Woods National Monument to dedicate a plaque to Franklin Roosevelt. As a shaft of sunlight struck through the interlaced redwood branches, Brazil's Leao Velloso said hopefully that the Conference was building "on indestructible foundations, a civilization in which wars will be placed outside the law."

/- For news of the sovereign Argentine Government's recent behavior, see LATIN AMERICA.

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