November 18, 1969
Page 34541
ADDRESS BY THE SECRETARY GENERAL U THANT TO THE NAVY LEAGUE
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, on October 28, Secretary General U Thant addressed the Navy League in New York City.
In his speech, the Secretary General addressed himself to criticism often lofted at the United Nations – that as an international body it is generally ineffective in resolving world problems. It is true that often in our concern with a crisis of the moment, we fail to view the broader spectrum of contributions the United Nations has made through its unique role as an international body in an age of often bitter nationalism. With this in mind, I submit the Secretary General's remarks as a perceptive analysis of the constructive influence the United Nations has exerted in the past and must continue to effect in the future, if nations of the world are to eradicate the enormous social and environmental problems which affect all of mankind.
I ask unanimous consent that the text of the speech be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
ADDRESS BY SECRETARY GENERAL U THANT TO NAVY LEAGUE
I am happy to participate in this fine gathering by which the Navy League has chosen to honour the United Nations tonight. I hope you will bear with me if I take this opportunity to look back to some of the fundamentals of the Charter and to examine with you their relevance to the demands and challenges which we must face today.
It has been said fairly regularly for the past twenty years or so that the United Nations is declining. Annually, at this time of the year, many people at the General Assembly tell each other that the life has gone out of the United Nations, that things aren't what they used to be and so on, ignoring the fact that people, both within and outside the United Nations, have said this every year since about 1948 when the United Nations was two years old. I would be the first to admit that the state of the United Nations, which reflects the state of the world, leaves a great deal to be desired, as it always has done. But having said that, it would be wise to search for the real reasons for this shortcoming rather than to escape from the problem by the easy course of blaming the world organization as if it were some independent all-powerful body. The trouble, of course, is not fundamentally with the concept of the United Nations but with the state of the world in relation to that concept. If the world and the world organization are to do better, they must tackle the problem at its roots. We all must ask ourselves why sovereign nations find it so hard to co-exist and co-operate sensibly except under the imminent threat of disaster or extinction, and what changes of attitude might begin to liberate us from this highly dangerous dilemma.
For the continuing frustration of the world organization is highly dangerous, and time is not on humanity's side. It is not only the threat of war which must deeply concern all responsible people, but also some of the other major problems of our age which can only be tackled and solved by real international co-operation and action, and whose solution is indispensable to secure an enduring peace.
There are now few serious and responsible people who do not agree with the objectives of the Charter – international peace and security, justice, equal rights and self-determination of peoples, economic and social progress, the elimination of racism in all its forms and human rights. The problem is to reconcile these objectives with national policies and with the concept of national sovereignty. It is also true that some of the means provided by the Charter to secure these ends have not worked out in the manner that was envisaged by the founding fathers. Of these, perhaps the most significant are the arrangements in Chapter VII of the Charter for the use by the Security Council of military force, including naval and air units, to maintain or restore international peace and security – provisions which, in their time, were considered to be among the most radical innovations of the Charter. These provisions have never been used. This is the result of two unforeseen events, the change in the nature of war caused by the development of atomic weapons, and the cold war, which have somewhat belied the notion that the Security Council, with the great powers in total agreement, would keep the peace of the world, if necessary by force.
But even supposing it had proved possible for the great powers to agree to constitute United Nations forces under the Security Council, would such an arrangement really have been of much assistance in the context of the last twenty-four years? The Chapter VII arrangement had been designed with Manchuria and the Nazi and Fascist aggressions of the 1930s especially in mind, for situations where aggressors could be easily identified and where the "good guys" of the international world would have no moral doubts about collectively fighting the "bad guys". But the situation that has prevailed since World War II defied such simplifications. It is worth remembering that United Nations enforcement measures were actually suggested as early as 1948 when war broke out in the Middle East. But this suggestion quickly lapsed when it was found impossible to answer even the simplest questions about such a United Nations force. Which way, by what criteria and at whom would it shoot, and who would give the command to shoot? On what ground would the force take its stand? What countries, indeed, would be prepared to lend their soldiers to such a force in such a situation?
And so one of the greatest innovations in the Charter has up till now remained a virtually dead letter. The idea of collective security which these arrangements were supposed to provide has broken down and has to some extent been replaced by regional defence pects outside the United Nations.
Meanwhile the United Nations has faced some of the novel challenges of the last twenty-four years by improvising the quite unforeseen mechanism which has come to be called peace- keeping. It has pioneered the use of military personnel and units in a non-violent role, acting as peace-keepers rather than soldiers, and relying for their success on the voluntary cooperation of the parties to a conflict, on the moral authority of the United Nations and on their own skill as pacifiers, negotiators and guardians of the peace. Peace-keeping on a voluntary basis has been undertaken in the Middle East, Kashmir, Lebanon, the Congo, Cyprus, and the Dominican Republic, for example, with considerable success in situations where an enforcement operation would have been out of the question. Although United Nations peace-keeping is still the subject of some international controversy, it has, I believe, provided in the political sphere one of the most encouraging examples of what internationalism, acting in the light of Charter principles and aims, can at its best achieve.
The United Nations Security Council itself provides an interesting example of a gradual return to Charter fundamentals after long years of frustration and paralysis. The Council, which has under the Charter primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, was originally intended to act on behalf of all the Members of the United Nations and, with the unanimity of the great powers, to deal with threats to world peace in an Olympian manner which would far transcend considerations of purely national interest. We know all too well how in the years of the cold war this dream was largely shattered, but it is encouraging to note that in the past few years the Security Council has taken on a new life by beginning to return to something like the original Charter concept. Where the Security Council used to specialize in acrimonious public disagreement, its members now strive laboriously for consensus and make a particular effort to avoid public displays of complete disagreement and deadlock. It now tends to pass important resolutions unanimously and has in the past two years succeeded in agreeing on resolutions upon some uniquely difficult subjects, such as the Middle East and Southern Rhodesia. The next essential step is to improve the effectiveness of and respect for the Council's decisions, but at least a first step in the right direction has been made – a step in the direction of international responsibility. There is a pressing need, however, to achieve for the Security Council and its decisions the sort of authority and influence envisaged for them in the Charter.
There is a disturbing tendency toward willful disregard and defiance of even the unanimous and repeated decisions of the Council, a tendency which erodes its authority.
The Council itself, and especially its permanent members, can best combat this tendency by following up, with all the various means at their disposal, the decisions of the Council, and by trying, through vigilance and persistence, to ensure that its decisions take real effect within a reasonable limit of time. If the world becomes accustomed to the decisions of the highest United Nations organ for peace and security going by default or being ignored, we shall have taken a very dangerous step backwards toward anarchy. The fabric of international peace will be seriously weakened, and bad situations will grow worse. I think especially of the Middle East, a problem for which the Council in November 1967 unanimously agreed on a resolution which was a major step toward a solution. Despite this considerable achievement, and after two years of effort, a. peaceful solution seems as far away as ever, and an almost daily outbreak of violent events makes it ever more possible that we may be witnessing in the Middle East something like the early stages of a new Hundred Years War. There has never been a situation in which all of the Security Council's prestige, resources and persistence, and the support of other Member States as well, were so vitally needed to reverse a disastrous trend.
We are still far from the spirit, or the realization, of the internationalism which the horrors of World War II inspired the authors of the Charter to strive for – and even to expect. Too often I have the feeling at the United Nations that Members are more preoccupied with making nationalism safe or saving themselves from the predictable results of their own policies than with pressing on to that international order and degree of mutual confidence which alone can begin to remove the threat of war, bring disarmament, promote a more just and equitable world and allow us to save ourselves from some of the social and economic disasters which threaten us ever more ominously as we approach the last quarter of the 20th century. National sovereignty and patriotism are fine concepts and have a vital place in the world. But already in other major fields of human activity they have taken their place in a larger order of loyalties and objectives with excellent results – I think, for instance, of the fields of science, of art, of communications, of commerce and, by no means least, of the world of youth.
It has become almost obligatory nowadays for public speakers to mention youth. I do so this evening not out of any sense of fashionable compulsion, but because I believe that the United Nations and the young people of the world have a lot to learn from each other and that we may all be missing a great opportunity through a failure, due to misunderstanding or ignorance, to identify the basic interests we have in common. It is often said that young people now show little interest in the work of the United Nations. In so far as this may be true, I think there is a good reason for it. Intelligent young people since time immemorial have tended to be critical of, or even to be against, the status quo as embodied in what has come to be known as the "Establishment". Sovereign Governments are certainly "Establishments", and the fact that 126 Governments constitute the United Nations makes the United Nations a super-Establishment, and therefore of limited concern to the progressive young. It is not surprising that a generation which takes the atom bomb, the computer, space exploration and supersonic earth travel for granted should not be unduly impressed by the concept of national sovereignty as the controlling influence in world politics. Many of the most intelligent young people all over the world are less and less interested in nationalism and increasingly regard themselves as an international entity with common interests, ideals and goals, which are not always sympathetic or understandable to their elders in the "Establishment".
But disillusion with the United Nations should not be a logical consequence of this state of mind – in fact, quite the contrary. Public disillusion with the United Nations is often based on ignorance of politics and history in general and of the history of the United Nations in particular.
In fact, the tendency in some young progressive circles to write off the world organization as just another instrument of the "Establishment" echoes the similar, and equally badly informed, sentiments which we have heard over the last twenty years from a diminishing chorus of isolationists and super-nationalists – a coincidence which would not, I believe, be welcome to either party. Let us bear in mind that although the United Nations is an organization of sovereign Governments, the collective will of the organization, inspired by the Charter, has worked solidly, and often effectively, for change in many vitally important areas of human activity. I think, for example, of the process of decolonization, which has liberated nearly a billion people in less than a quarter of a century – a development on a scale which was inconceivable in 1945 and in which the United Nations has played a central role. I think of the concept of international assistance for economic development, which has in twenty short years become an accepted fact, so that the obligation of the rich nations to assist the poor ones is now widely regarded as a normal feature of life and a new moral precept in the international community. I think of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the effort to make it increasingly applicable and the endless struggle against racism and discrimination in all their different forms which has been and is being waged in the United Nations. In all of these developments we must recognize that progress is slow and that certain major obstacles have so far remained. But the spirit and the aims are there, as well as enough practical results to point the way. It is this kind of activity that makes the United Nations greater than the sum of its parts, the 126 sovereign member nations. The United Nations has set, and will, I am sure, continue to set, high standards and to urge nations, whose individual policies on such matters may often be weak or indecisive, to cooperate for their achievement. Quite apart from the peace-keeping and peacemaking achievements of the organization, this is by no means an inconsiderable or insignificant record.
I hope, therefore, that people, whatever age group they may belong to will sometimes take the time, and make the effort, to go back to the fundamentals of the Charter, and to find out how they have been developed and put into effect over the first twenty-four years of the United Nations; and to ask themselves what can be done now to make a better and more fruitful world on the basis of these fundamental principles. Older people may well find unexpected progress in many areas which have been forgotten, and the young may realize that many of the things they seek and to which they attach importance have all along been very much at the heart of the United Nations effort.
Of all human activities, the relations between States seem to have been left stranded in the old pattern of rigid nationalism, while in most other important fields of activity men have stepped forward into a more contemporary and more international setting. Nothing could do more to increase the effectiveness of the United Nations than a modification of the concept of national sovereignty in harmony with the intellectual and technological realities of our time, and here I believe that artists, scientists, business men, those who deal with communications of all kinds, and the young people can help us in a decisive way. I have confidence that the new internationalism of the young and a reassertion of the spirit of internationalism which inspired the Charter will help us to make this crucial step forward before it is too late.