No abstract

Old soldiers may “just fade away” as General Douglas MacArthur reminded us, but the controversy over the relative merits of regionalism and globalism in international organization will ever be with us. That question generated as much heat as any other issue at San Francisco in 1945 with the possible exception of the veto. In more recent years the inadequacies of the United Nations, the changing nature of the Cold War, the growth and expansion of regional organizations, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the continued shrinking of the universe have kept the heat of this controversy at a relatively high level.

Toward the close of the San Francisco Conference, Czechoslovakia's Jan Masaryk remarked that his feeling toward the new Charter “was much like that of the father fondly awaiting the birth of a son. The baby finally arrives and it turns out to be a girl. At first the father is somewhat disappointed, but he soon learns to like her just the same.” While the delegates as a whole believed that their work would go down in history as one of the great documents of all times, many no doubt shared Masaryk's view. For when a document as comprehensive as the Charter is framed, no one gets exactly what he wants.The article of the Charter that raised the most controversy at San Francisco and the article that epitomizes the nature of the Organization, perhaps more than any other, is the Yalta formula for voting in the Security Council. So heated did the debate on this issue become that Room 223 in the Veterans Building, where the meetings of Committee III/l were held, was dubbed the “Madison Square Garden” of San Francisco. The frankness and candor with which the delegates exchanged views constitutes, in many respects, a good example of international democracy in action.It is the purpose of this paper to review the action taken at San Francisco with respect to the Yalta voting formula and to point out the relationship of that formula to the special position of the great powers in the new Organization.

Modern warfare is waged on at least four fronts through the coördinated efforts of military, economic, diplomatic, and progaganda weapons. Not the least of these is propaganda. Conscious as never before of the catastrophic effect of war upon humankind, the people of a nation must be convinced, before they can be called upon to make the supreme sacrifice, that they are fighting in the name of Truth and Right. It is desirable, therefore, to portray the enemy as a wicked, murderous aggressor, a fit subject for the collective hatred of the state. Once a people become convinced of the blamelessness of their own government and aroused by a spirit of righteous indignation against the enemy, the problem of motivation becomes much easier.

Only a decade or two ago, the Monroe Doctrine was in disfavor. The vitriolic pens of its critics denounced it as an “indisputable evidence of our overweening national conceit.” They condemned it as an “obsolete shibboleth,” “hoary with age”—a doctrine which the twentieth century would surely relegate to the dusty archives of diplomatic history. As late as 1937, no less a person than the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations remarked in the course of an interview that the Monroe Doctrine was dead.Time and circumstance, however, often bring remarkable changes. Since the beginning of World War II, the red blood corpuscles of Pan-American unity have instilled new life and vitality into the Doctrine. Curiously enough, after 120 years, the very threats which confronted President Monroe in 1823 have risen again to becloud the security of the Western Hemisphere. Historians may have argued (before the fall of France) that the Holy Alliance, with its determination “to put an end to the system of representative government,” constituted a greater danger to the New World than the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis. It is clear, however, that the fascist concepts of the master race and of world domination are far more menacing to democracy than the avowed aims of the Holy Alliance ever were. The tremendous striking power which the Axis has so amply demonstrated in a world shrivelled by technology, coupled with the demoralizing effects of up-to-date fifth column techniques, makes the case even clearer.