UNITED NATIONS: Arms & the Man

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Early one morning last week a Swissair DC-6B set down ten miles from the Suez Canal city of Ismailia. Out of the plane, looking slightly airsick, trooped 45 apple-cheeked young Danish soldiers wearing sky-blue helmet liners and arm bands. Falling them in, 30-year-old 1st Lieut. Axel Bojsen marched his men past a hangar, gutted by British bombers, up to an Egyptian brigadier. "On behalf of the Egyptian armed forces," intoned the brigadier, "I welcome you as guests, as troops of the United Nations Emergency Force."

Within the next 24 hours, the world's first international police force landed at Abou Suweir air base—196 men: 45 Danes, 97 Norwegians and 54 Colombians. They were the first of a projected 6.000. Along with the Colombians came the man who had brought this historic force into being: a slight-shouldered, sandy-haired Swedish civilian named Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjold.

Equipped only with small arms—and moral authority—U.N. Secretary-General Hammarskjold and his flea-sized army appeared Lilliputian figures alongside the forces they were to keep apart (the Anglo-French invasion force alone was 50,000 strong). In Egypt the puny army must somehow ensure that two of the greatest nations in Europe abandon with grievous loss of face a last-ditch attempt to dominate a region of the world vital to their survival as major powers.

Far to the north lay an even tougher challenge with which neither Hammarskjold nor any of his men had yet come to grips—the barbaric Soviet repression of Hungary's fight for liberty. And behind these specific problems lay the two historic convulsions of the mid-20th century world: the upsurge of the peoples of Asia and Africa, and the conflict between Communism and democracy. The difficulties were immense. "For the first time in history," said Dwight Eisenhower, "an international machinery, set up by nations for the settlement of international disputes, is receiving a truly thorough test."

Armless Parliament. With deliberate optimism, the President left unsaid one fundamental fact: the test which the U.N. faced last week is a bigger one than it was designed to meet. Whatever the world's hopeful liberals and war-weary, propaganda-stuffed peoples may have believed, the hardheaded diplomats who met in San Francisco to write the U.N. Charter in the dying months of World War II had no intention of establishing a world government. At the common insistence of the major powers—the U.S. and Britain were just as adamant as the U.S.S.R.—the U.N.'s founders wrote into its constitution not just the veto but a series of provisions intended to ensure that the U.N. would never infringe on the sovereignty of its members—or, at any rate, of its big members. The fruit of their calculating labors was an emasculated version of the American Continental Congress: an armless parliament.*