Can the United Nations Enforce Peace?
Article Summary and Author Biography
SIR LESLIE MUNRO, New Zealand Ambassador to the United States, 1952-58; President of the U.N. General Assembly, 1958; formerly Dean of the Faculty of Law, Auckland University College, and editor of the New Zealand Herald
ON September 4 of this year the Laotian Government, in a message to the Secretary-General, requested the assistance of the United Nations and "in particular . . . that an emergency force to halt aggression and to prevent its spreading should be dispatched with greatest possible speed." In the debate in the Security Council on September 7, 1959, Sir Pierson Dixon, on behalf of the United Kingdom, said that his Government had for some time favored the creation of a stand-by force which would be available to the United Nations. "But," he said, "the fact is that no such force exists."
Sir Pierson could have gone further. If Laos becomes the victim of aggression, it hardly seems likely that the United Nations will save her, given the fact that the world organization has no stand-by force, even one which by its simple presence might deter military activity. It will be only SEATO, or more probably its principal party, the United States, that can or will come to the aid of this distressed country. In other words, the chief bulwark of endangered states today is not the United Nations but either a great power or a regional organization.
In the context of this article I do not need to discuss the merits of the Laotian complaint. But Sir Pierson Dixon's observations lend point to Mr. Lester Pearson's questions, posed in an article in this review,[i] on the problem of the establishment of a United Nations force available to cope with an emergency:
Are we to go on from crisis to crisis improvising in haste? Or can we now pool our experience and our resources, so that the next time we, the governments and peoples whom the United Nations represents, will be ready and prepared to act?
The purpose of this article is to urge that in a troubled and divided world the time for improvising in haste is past, and that we need now to grapple with the question of establishing an effective United Nations force readily available in an emergency...
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