Implications and Questions for the Future

Undertaking to write about the future of the United Nations may well be regarded as a risky if not a downright foolhardy enterprise, particularly in 1965, between the tragicomedy of the nineteenth General Assembly and the great uncertainty of the twentieth session. For many people, the question is whether the United Nations has a future, and for some of them this question is purely rhetorical. I think that it has, or that, at any rate, general international organization has a future. Whatever may happen to the United Nations, I find it difficult to conceive that the men who conduct the foreign relations of states will ever again consider that they can dispense with a comprehensive institutional mechanism or that they will, in the foreseeable future, contrive a global mechanism fundamentally different in character from the United Nations. Objectively, the operation of the international system requires an organizational framework virtually coextensive with the system; just as education requires schools and universities and medicine requires hospitals and clinics, so international relations require at least as much organizational apparatus as the United Nations system provides. Moreover, there is evidence that this objective need has penetrated the consciousness of most statesmen. The questions that they have asked about international organization in the last twenty years have not included the question of whether it is sensible to equip the international system with a general institutional structure.