The Impact of African States on the United Nations

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.