International: 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.