Preliminary Considerations

Since the notion of international co-operation was embedded in Article 55 of the United Nations Charter, the world has witnessed a number of localised wars and crisis situations in the Third World: for instance Vietnam, the Middle East, the Congo, Cuba, Mozambique, etc. Some of these which arose from the desire of a people to assert their right to independence, have to some extent found solutions only at the mercy of reciprocal concessions between third or interested powers, while others, because of the diplomacy of distrust coupled with emergent nationalisms, have failed to find adequate solutions. This is to say that, within the field of international politics, international co-operation has not matured to a degree of sufficient solidarity. For example, the French and American military interventions in Gabon and in the Dominican Republic in 1964 and April 1965, respectively, the ‘quarantine’ or ‘selective’ blockade of Cuba in October 1962, meant to paralyse the construction and reinforcement of Soviet missile bases on Cuban territory, and various localised wars to which no concrete solutions have been found all suggest rightly that the political arena still has a long way to go to achieve a desired international co-operation and law. The Third World has also been characterised by a series of changes of government by violent means, particularly in Latin America and African countries.