The United Nations Organization! Can It Prevent War?

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In the previous issue: The question of peace has been one of the great preoccupations of thought since the earliest ages • The views of certain philosophers and thinkers • The correct approach: seeking the cause of the disease and rooting it out • The political cause: absolute national sovereignty.

Before me lies the “Charter of the United Nations,” which, in the estimation of the fifty-two states that took part in preparing it and approved it unanimously, is sufficient to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” I turn its pages and look closely at certain of its paragraphs, as though I had known it before. For these tortuous expressions, this ingenuity in slipping out of tight corners, remind me of another covenant, drawn up in similar circumstances, after a great world war, approved unanimously by the allied states, and said to “open a new chapter in the history of mankind and guarantee it welfare and peace”... the Covenant of the “League of Nations,” whose ink had scarcely dried before revolutions and wars flared up in the four corners of the inhabited world, and then the great war burst forth — the Second World War.

Truly, between the two covenants there is a strange and suspicious resemblance.

I do not mean a resemblance in form, text, and letter. Those are surface matters with which scholars of law sometimes amuse themselves, studying and scrutinizing them to death. What concerns me is to penetrate to the essence, to the intentions, to the spirit that inspired this honeyed talk after devising hidden ways of escaping from it and from the responsibilities that flow from it.

Read the first article of the Charter: it declares frankly and plainly that the aim of the organization is “to maintain international peace and security,” and it makes clear also that, to attain this end, the organization must take effective measures “for the removal of everything that might threaten the peace,” and for the punishment of “every aggression and breach of the peace, and the settlement of the disputes that might lead to the cracking of the peace.”

Such is the honeyed talk — the word “peace” occurs in it four times running in a single sentence!

As for the hidden ways — the stratagems that the cunning of politicians has devised to turn this talk to dust — here are some of them:

First — the Charter does not touch with a single word, nor hint even in the faintest way, at the most important causes disturbing peace in our present world: I mean the economic causes. The division of raw materials and the occupation of the world's commercial markets — the two gravest international questions of all — received no attention from the allied states at the San Francisco conference or at the preparatory conferences that paved the way for it. The truth is that these states preferred silence and connivance, and evaded raising these thorny questions. And so the dispute remained, at bottom, what it had been before this war and before the San Francisco conference. There are still two camps of states in the world: states monopolizing the riches of the earth, and states deprived of them.

Second — the foundations on which the United Nations organization was built are not “world” foundations in the full sense of the word. The united nations are in reality the front of the victorious states, the states that prevailed over Germany and her ally. Whether the defeated states join the United Nations organization in the future or do not join it, their future position will change nothing in the essence of things. The organization will carry its “original sin” to the end. The order it was created to uphold and foster is a partisan order, willed by one camp to the exclusion of the other. Add to this that relations between the victorious states and the vanquished states are defined and decided outside the organization, at the peace conferences and in the great capitals, and the United Nations has no say in them. Tomorrow the peace treaties will be a heavy burden on the organization's shoulders — a wearying, crushing burden beneath which strength and resolve will give way...

Third — the Charter created no neutral body to adjudicate disputes. The members of the organization are the representatives of states with conflicting interests, who stir not a finger nor utter a syllable except at the prompting of their governments. It is not permissible, this being so, to regard the United Nations organization as a supreme court of justice, since its judges enjoy no independence whatever, and very often the judges in it are the litigants themselves...

Fourth — the Charter stipulates that the decisions of the Security Council — and the Security Council is the principal body of the organization — be taken by a majority of at least seven votes (out of eleven). It stipulates also — and here is the essential element of corruption — that among these seven votes there be the votes of all five of the Great Powers (Article 27). That is, the Security Council can take no decision unless the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, China, and France approve that decision. Should one of these powers see fit to differ with its companions on any subject whatsoever, it paralyzes the work of the organization completely, even if all the states of the earth are against it in opinion. And when we recall that states listen only to the voice of their interests; that the Great Powers have interests in every quarter of the inhabited world; and that these interests are, more often than not, clashing and contradictory — then we lose, or all but lose, every hope that the Security Council will take a sound decision in any question of consequence among those laid before it.

Fifth — the states taking part in the San Francisco conference agreed in principle on the necessity of “regulating” armament (they agreed on “regulating” it — not on “abolishing” it, nor on “reducing” it). I do not know what is meant by the word “regulating” armament; it is one of those words that come in out of place and can be interpreted in a thousand and one ways, and there is no doubt that the states picked it deliberately, because it answers the purpose exactly and admits all sorts of strange interpretations and theories. And yet, although the “regulation” of armament means nothing in reality, the organization shrinks from alluding to it, and I do not think it will dare to raise it in the near future. Meanwhile you see the Great Powers going forward with the building of huge war factories, the improvement of their weapons, and the encouragement of “scientific” discoveries and inventions that multiply their destructive capacity. And armament, even if it is not the direct cause of war, nevertheless stirs up pride and vainglory and encourages the plunge into the fray of war, because it strengthens the hope of prevailing.

Sixth — the United Nations organization possesses no effective means of executing its decisions. It was expected, and agreed at the San Francisco conference, that the states would place at the disposal of the United Nations armed forces enabling it to execute its decisions. But the texts of the Charter dealing with this matter content themselves with laying down the principle, postpone execution to an unnamed date, and pass loftily over the practical details: they set no date, name no state, designate no post, define no competence, and determine neither the size of the contribution nor the conditions of command and execution. And I do not think the Great Powers — floundering today in a mighty political struggle, as though preparing for a decisive war, as though that war were at the gates — I do not think the powers have become readier today than they were last year to give up a part, however small, of their forces, to present it as a gift to the United Nations organization.

Let us suppose that a dispute broke out between two states or more, grew worse, and threatened catastrophe. (Let us not suppose — though the supposition would be in place — that the catastrophe actually occurred; for the outbreak of war must be regarded as a death sentence upon the United Nations organization, a sentence final and executed on the spot.) Grant that the Security Council succeeded, after long labor and pains, and after the reports of committees and experts, in taking a decision on which the unanimity of the five Great Powers was achieved: can the United Nations organization execute this decision if a state, of its own free will, declines to carry it out? The Charter provides, in this case, that the Security Council ask the members of the organization to impose economic sanctions on the recalcitrant member (and the sanctions are decided, of course, only by the unanimity of the Great Powers). If economic sanctions avail nothing, then the members are asked (following the same procedure) to apply certain military sanctions. Do not imagine these “sanctions” a grave affair: there is nothing frightening in the word but the name. As for what the name contains, it amounts to no more than an innocent pleasantry and a Platonic piece of bluster. Article 42 has described it, citing as examples of military “sanctions”: “the carrying out of maneuvers, and the imposition of a blockade effected by forces belonging to members of the organization.” I do not think these sanctions will be applied; and if one day they are applied, they are in any case not frightening, and may produce no effect beyond the gathering of the boys of the coastal towns on the shores of the blockaded country to watch the warships of the allied powers carrying out their maneuvers.

No — the United Nations organization cannot prevent the coming of war. The restraints it imposes upon states are verbal restraints that diminish no one's liberty, and no one pays them any heed.

War is an inescapable necessity in our present world, because our world rests on corrupt foundations. These corrupt foundations are the division of the world into “independent” states concerned only with the realization of their own particular interests, without regard for the interests and rights of others. Unless there arises in the world a supreme authority overseeing the states as a central government oversees the local administrations, and unless that authority alone has the right to possess armies and equipment so as to execute its decisions by force if need be, world peace will not be realized.

Inquiry into the formation of this world government may be a species of pure fantasy in the present circumstances; yet it is the only road that must be traveled to reach the goal.

And the formation of a world government is, in reality, a fantastic project. For what state in the world would voluntarily renounce its absolute national “sovereignty” and the right to possess armed forces? And it has the right not to renounce them, for individual sacrifice avails nothing. It has the right, because the prevailing economic order — I mean the capitalist order — compels the industrial states to be colonizing states, in order to reach sources of raw materials to feed their industries; to open commercial markets for the disposal of their products; to occupy strategic positions, build mighty fleets, and raise armies to defend their economic position when the need arises. No industrial capitalist country can dispense with the raw materials found outside its borders, nor dispose of its products within those borders. Competition, which is one of the rules of capitalism, allows survival only to him who lowers his selling prices; and selling prices are lowered only if raw materials can be had at the lowest possible price (so the capitalist imposes his state's authority upon the weak countries and exploits their resources on favorable terms), and if workers' wages sink to their lowest limits (and this sinking curtails the workers' purchasing power; the industrialist then finds himself unable to dispose of his goods within his country's borders, and goes looking for foreign markets).

This is the disease: the causes of wars in our present age are, in their basis and origin, economic causes; and the removal of wars cannot be thought of unless their causes are removed — unless the present economic order collapses, and another order takes its place, treating the problems of production and distribution in a manner built on the foundations of science, justice, and equality.

Wars will not disappear unless a world government arises; and a world government cannot arise unless the capitalist order disappears.