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The Super-Powers at San Francisco

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

William T. R. Fox
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Extract

The Charter of San Francisco is the modest end-product of the mightiest collective literary effort in history. Fifty delegations, comprising literally thousands of principal and subordinate personnel, labored feverishly for two months to achieve agreement on a constitution for the new world security organization.1 In contrast, the Covenant of the League of Nations was drafted by one of the commissions of the Peace Conference of Paris, on which there sat two representatives of each of the five major powers and one representative from each of nine of the secondary powers. This group of nineteen men met fifteen times.2

The very broad participation of the smaller powers in the San Francisco Conference is obviously not to be explained in terms of their growing influence in world politics. Although the number of prospective permanent seat-holders in die Council of the proposed world organization was the same at Paris and at San Francisco, there had been in the intervening quarter-century a reduction rather than an increase in the number of powers of greatest influence.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 1946 , pp. 115 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1946

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References

1 “In all, 282 delegates, representing 50 states, attended, and with their staffs they amounted to 1,726 persons officially working for their states. The International Secretariat, mostly recruited from the United States, numbered 1,058 persons. A total of 2,636 newspaper, radio, etc., representatives were present, and it required the aid of 2,262 Army and Navy boys and girls, 800 AWVS, 400 Red Cross, and 800 Boy Scouts—not to mention 188 telephone and telegraph operators—to service the Conference. The average daily output of documents was about half a million sheets of paper, and on one day 1,700,000 sheets were issued and distributed….” Eagleton, C., “The Charter Adopted at San Francisco,” American Political Science Review, XXXIX, No. 5 (10, 1945), p. 935.Google Scholar

2 At its tenth meeting on Feb. 14, 1919, the Commission approved a draft of the Covenant which was submitted to the delegations at the Conference for comment and criticism and also to representatives of neutral states not in attendance at the Conference. Thus, the states not represented on the Commission had some opportunity to participate in the drafting process. See Miller, David Hunter, The Drafting of the Covenant (New York, 1928).Google Scholar

3 When, however, steps were taken to bring Germany into the League with a permanent seat on the Council, Poland, Brazil, Spain, China, and Persia all pressed claims. Brazil's claim was in such terms that refusal of it made it necessary for that state to give notice of its withdrawal from the League. The other states were satisfied by a reorganization of the procedure for electing non-permanent Council members so as to permit certain states to be immediately re-elected. See Howard-Ellis, C., The Origin, Structure, and Working of the League of Nations (London, 1928), pp. 142–147.Google Scholar

4 Fox, W. T. R., The Super-Powers (New York, 1944).Google Scholar See especially Chapter II for an exposition of the power pattern in the international politics of our time.

5 China's Ambassador to Moscow was an original signatory to the Moscow Declaration, but he was not a full-fledged participant in its drafting. The Dumbarton Oaks Conference was in the form of two conferences, with the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union participating in the first and the United States, Great Britain, and China in the second. There can be little doubt that the significant decisions were made in the first stage.

6 An example of a European statesman's views on great-power hegemony is that by Hambro, C. J.: “It is the demand of all the small nations that the leaders of the great countries shall be strengthened and not thwarted in their efforts —.” New York Times, 01 23, 1944.Google Scholar

7 Art. 17, Constitution of 1936. The great encouragement given in the school, court, theater, and press to the use of the non-Russian languages in the areas inhabited by non-Russian peoples has canalized the urge of such groups for autonomy in directions which are not disruptive of the Union. See Cobban, Alfred, National Self-Determination (New York, 1945),Google Scholar for a reassessment of the “right” of national self-determination in an era in which the most viable political units are not necessarily or even predominantly those which are indicated by an ethnic map.

8 The controversy at San Francisco over the use of the terms “self-government” and “independence” to describe the objectives for which the trusteeship system was created illustrates the greater freedom of the Soviet delegation to use symbols of unlimited appeal. For the Western powers, the word “independence” connotes a degree of autonomous determination of major policy which it clearly does not possess for Communists. The formula by which the controversy was resolved, after the Soviet delegation had been made to appear as the defender of the aspirations of the freedom-loving peoples and the British and American delegations had been made to appear as the defender of old-fashioned imperialism, was as follows: “Article 76. The basic objectives of the trusteeship system … shall be … to promote … progressive development towards self-government or independence as may be appropriate to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.”

9 Any one-state-one-vote arrangement would create in the world community a proportion of “rotten boroughs” far exceeding that of the United States Senate or of the British House of Commons at its worst. The evils of such a system are greatest where decisions are by a simple majority. The nearer the minimum required vote approaches unanimity the less the possibility of the result being manipulated by marshaling the votes of the “rotten boroughs.” On the other hand, the closer the minimum vote approaches unanimity the greater the possibility that the organization will be condemned to inaction in a moment of crisis.

10 The Belgian delegate, M. Spaak, supported the Soviet request that this vote be postponed “so as to enable the Soviet Delegation to confer with the representatives of the other three great powers, in an effort to arrive at a decision that shall express their unanimity.” Spaak, M. made repeated reference to the importance of “the principle of maintaining complete unanimity between the four sponsoring nations.” United Nations Conference on International Organization, Verbatim Minutes of the Fifth Plenary Session,April 30, 1945 (Doc. 42, P/10, May 1, 1945)Google Scholar.

11 United Nations Conference on International Organization, Journal, No. 6 (05 1, 1945), p. 20.Google Scholar

12 Calculations of probable voting behavior rested on the unstated assumption that it was the United States which determined the voting pattern of the American bloc. In the matter of the Argentine invitation, the pressure was the other way. The inter-American solidarity which the United States delegation was called upon to express by its support of its sister republics in the Argentine matter may have been a solidarity against inquiring too closely into the internal character of a regime whose external commitments are formally in order. Many Latin-American governments which on almost every issue would be willing to woo the goodwill of their great North American neighbor would have regretted a blackballing of Argentina on the sole ground of its undemocratic and anti-democratic regime. By its stand in the Argentine question the United States’ position seemed to be that it was not dictatorship but anti-United States dictatorship which was to be opposed.

The subsequent attempt by the United States and Mexican representatives to modify the unfortunate impression created outside the Americas by the Argentine invitation was not particularly effective. Ezequiel Padilla, then Foreign Minister of Mexico, attempted to retrieve his country's reputation for being anti-Fascist by moving the adoption of an “interpretative commentary” on what is now Article 4 of the Charter. Assistant Secretary of State James C. Dunn, speaking for the United States, supported the proposal. Its effect was to make clear that Spain would be ineligible for membership in the United Nations Organization so long as the regime of Generalissimo Franco remained in power. The proposal was adopted by acclamation. See United Nations Conference on International Organization, Journal, No. 50 (06 21, 1945).Google Scholar

1/3 Matters related to the scope of the veto continued to be debated to the very end of the Conference, but after the Soviet concession on the veto of items for discussion, the middle-power delegates, seeking to confine the scope of the veto, shifted their attack to questions outside the security field, e. g., the procedure for amending or replacing the United Nations Charter.

1/4 The Big Five also were firmly united, for example, in opposing General Assembly participation in decisions to take enforcement action, in opposing the inclusion in the Charter of any definition of aggression, and in opposing limitations on the capacity of the Five Powers to act to preserve peace and security during the transitional period before the Security Council assumes full responsibilities.