In the United Nations as in other political organizations elective offices are eagerly sought as badges of prestige and levers of influence. Some of the most hotly contested political battles in the United Nations have centred around elections to the prestigious and influential nonpermanent seats on the Security Council. Contests have sometimes run to many ballots before any country emerged with the required two-thirds majority, and deadlock has more than once forced a compromise in which the two-year term was divided between two contenders. Indicative of the feeling sometimes aroused was Indonesia's withdrawal from the United Nations in 1965 which, although prompted by other motives as well, was timed to serve as a protest against the seating of Malaysia on the Security Council. Contests for other positions are generally less spirited, but there are invariably more office seekers than offices.

The United Nations at its present stage of development is a political system of formally coordinate Members, each able to place before the Organization the demands that flow from its own environment. One can hypothesize that a stable environment will yield a stable pattern of demands on the United Nations political system. Similarly it can be hypothesized that a change in the environment—the major components of which are the Member States—will change the pattern of demands made on the political system of the Organization. It is on just such a change that this article proposes to focus. In the period between 1955 and the end of 1968, 37 African states, largely devoid of experience in the contemporary international arena and struggling with the multitudinous problems of fashioning coherent national entities in the face of both internal and external pressures, joined the United Nations. The admission of these states substantially altered the Organization's environment and the demands being made upon it. It is suggested here that these changes have been so substantial as to alter the nature of the political process of the Organization. Concern will be focused successively upon the nature of the entry of the African states into the United Nations, a determination of the areas in which the African states have made demands upon the system, the constitutional structure of the Organization as it has evolved under the impact of the African states, the impact of the African states on the handling of major issues, and finally on trends and implications of the role of African states in the United Nations.

In recent years political scientists have given increasing attention to the phenomenon of legitimacy, defined, following Richard Merelman, as the quality of “oughtness” perceived by members of a political system to inhere in the system's authorities and/or regime. The more the regime is regarded as morally proper and elicits generalized favorable attitudes from its constituency—i.e., is perceived to be legitimate—the more the members are predisposed to comply with directives of the authorities even when they are under no serious compulsion to do so or their own immediate self-interest does not so dictate.

The decision of the Supreme Council of the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919 to place the German colonies and Turkish territories under the supervision of the League of Nations raised serious political and legal questions to which no one had satisfactory answers. But, by contrast with the numerous recent studies of World War I and the Peace Conference that deal at least in passing with the origins and establishment of the mandates system, there are very few satisfactory scholarly essays that analyzer the aftermath of the Peace Conference's deliberations on international colonial affairs. The opening of the archives of the government of the United Kingdom after 1919 provides a good opportunity to review the subject and to examine what the unpublished records reveal about international supervision in colonial areas.

Members of most organizations are involved at different levels of intensity: Some participants pay more attention to the organization than others. Thus the question “Who cares about the organization?” can lead to significant findings about differential levels of involvement. These findings, in turn, suggest members’ policy priorities as well as illuminating Behavioral patterns within the organization.

As common markets, free trade associations, and limited-purpose regional arrangements continue to proliferate in many corners of the globe, the basic question of the relevance of these efforts to the process of building political communities also continues to be posed for theorist and practitioner alike. One approach for linking these two phenomena is the intensive and comparative study of common markets and free trade associations in terms of their capacity to transform member states into a political union. In principle, at least, the careful and comparative study of key variables in the process of achieving and perfecting economic unity at the regional level could yield propositions which might have predictive value for assessing the chances of success of various discrete efforts at regional unification. In methodological terms such an approach would combine case studies with the use of aggregate data.

In an earlier article published in this journal Ernst Haas and this author suggested a set of strategic “background conditions,” “conditions at the time of initiation,” and “process conditions” intended (hypothetically) to assess the political consequences of an initial agreement to lower or remove mutual barriers to the movement of productive factors.

Resuming its 22nd session at United Nations Headquarters on April 24, 1968, the General Assembly held its 1643rd–1672nd plenary meetings drought June 12, 1968. The session was formally closed at the 1673rd plenary meeting, held on September 23, 1968. The Assembly agreed without objection to a procedure outlined by its President, Cornelia Manes cu (Rumania), under which the First (Political and Security) Committee would discuss the report submitted by the Conference of the Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament (ENDC) concerning its negotiations on a nonproliferation treaty while the plenary considered the question of South West Africa. Also on the agenda was the situation in the Middle East.

In his Introduction to the Annual Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization, September 1968 Secretary-General U Thant observed that during the period under review the deterioration of the international political situation had continued. There had been no progress toward peace in Vietnam; in the Middle East the year had been one of continuing tension and frustration; developments in Czechoslovakia had created a feeling of insecurity. In the field of economic and social development the second session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) had not lived up to the great expectations of the participants, especially the developing countries. The chronic problems in the field of decolonization and apartheid had only deepened. Some limited progress had, however, been made in the fields of disarmament, outer space, and human rights.