CHAPTER V: PRINCIPAL PROBLEMS IN ACHIEVING A WORLD ORDER

Some of the major difficulties have already been cited or implied in the course of discussion. Others can be noted. They are summarized briefly under this heading.

COMMUNITY AND CONSENSUS

Perhaps the most provocative feature of our futuristic landscape is the subsidence of communist expansionism along with its doctrinal hostility to all elements of the world not under its writ. The picture of a disarmed, centrally governed world is intolerably romantic without the assumption we have made — perhaps equally romantic — that this limited but crucial degree of supranational authority is genuinely accepted by communist nations as strategically safe and ideologically palatable. To an important degree the same would be true of the United States, of such prideful nations as France, and of the many countries only now undergoing the exhilaration of intense nationalism. Is it possible that the Soviet Union and China could be brought to abandon their messianic ambitions and subordinate themselves to the writ of a higher authority — a notion which runs counter to all the teaching of communist doctrine? Would only a damaging war make China a willing party in the foreseeable future? Above all, even if the Soviet leaders genuinely desired a disarmament agreement, is there any chance that they would accept its corollary — detente, and international security arrangements to substitute for national force—conditions which the West tends to assume are indispensable accompaniments to disarmament? The difference is of course profound: Soviet doctrine repudiates the status quo and apparently conceives of disarmament as a cheaper, safer way to carry out its policies; the Western position requires that those who disarm accept a new order policed at least as effectively as in an armed world, with supranational power substituting for national.

For that matter, would the United States itself seriously consider disbanding its own armaments and abrogating to an international authority beyond its direct control the authority and the power to do those things which in modern history have been the prerogative of the nation? It is not simply a question of good faith by the policy-makers. Would the United States Senate ratify such a scheme? So long as communism persists as a threat to American society, is there any chance of such a scheme being agreed to? (And if there were no communist menace, would anyone be worrying about the need for such a revolution in international political arrangements?)

The quick answers to these questions, so put, tend to be negative. For the one sound basis of community — genuine consensus — is not yet apparent between the chief actors on the world stage. This finding needs to be examined more closely.

We accept here the equation according to which wholesome community building at any level is a process in which consensus (consent and acquiescence in the general ground rules and overall values of the system) comes first. It may then be followed by development of a community with some organic coherence. Such community in turn is the base on which edifices of government and, finally, of law can be erected. A “normal” historical process, in which ever-larger units evolve through customs unions, confederation, regionalism, etc., until ultimately the larger units coalesce under a global umbrella, could take up to two hundred years, on past performance figures, and even this may be optimistic.

It is technology which requires us to accelerate the process. Yet nothing in technology has yet shown itself capable of altering the elements of the basic equation. Conceivably the rate of cultural and political change will henceforth increase as a function of enlarged ability to educate, inform, and bring together large numbers of people. But even if mass media, cultural exchange, and generally better international communication were to succeed in lessening the incidence and virulence of nationalism and xenophobia, the internationalizing process confronts a built-in obstacle — the immense vested powers, interests, and traditions of government. In virtually every country there exists an establishment that carries from generation to generation the legacies of the national past.

Most “peace movements” assert that “peoples” regard each other as brothers, in contradistinction to governments and their vested establishments, seen as forces of resistant conservatism. If this is so, the only agency requiring a genuine change of heart is government. But the thesis is not entirely convincing. It is by no means certain that the American people, for example, are presently ready to vote the national military establishment out of existence in favor of an international agency controlled by a combination of nations.

The international north-south conflict, characterized by bitter racial resentments and vast economic disparities, is an equally obstructive roadblock to the denationalization of power, unless those at the short end of the social or economic scale become convinced that they would come into what they regard as their birthright more quickly or more surely under a would government. Possibly this could be demonstrated on the basis that the voice of the presently power-lacking states would increase in the uses of world power. But power could not be simply transferred from those who now hold it to those who do not, under the guise of a world government. The safeguards and weightings cited earlier would indeed be designed to see that this did not happen. Only significant reduction in the tensions growing out of recent colonial relationships and the economic disparities could overcome this barrier to achievement of the model.

A related problem is that at least a third of the countries in the world are only now beginning to traverse the stages of nationalism which traditionally precede, accompany, and follow national independence. If some of them are also going to experience the acute pathology of malignant nationalism in the fashion of Germany, Italy, and Japan in living memory, the prospect is dim for consensus leading to formation of a universal community with a preponderance of power at the center.

I have suggested that an alternative road may bypass the main path of history, shortcircuiting the organic stages of consensus, value formation, and the experiences of common enterprise generally believed to underlie political community. This relies on a grave crisis or war to bring about a sudden transformation in national attitudes sufficient for the purpose. According to this version, the order we examine may be brought into existence as a result of a series of sudden, nasty, and traumatic shocks. But does this sufficiently lay the basis for genuine community, adequate to create a durable world order? The transforming experience, whether evolutionary or revolutionary, must, to achieve the foundation of consensus requisite for community, be enough to reach and move great masses of people, many of whom are not now touched by governmental processes, or a fortiori by international relations. In the end, the question of feasibility can only be answered with a prediction: once critical mass had taken place, however tentatively or suspiciously, a new and essentially unpredictable dynamic would have been set in motion, sufficient to confound predictions made from this side of the line.

DISARMAMENT

National disarmament is a condition sine qua non for effective UN control. Yet the known difficulties of general disarmament are overwhelming. This is not the place to argue its desirability or undesirability. What we have assumed is that perhaps as a consequence of a massive crisis it is neither inherently nor technically impossible to design a program whereby all nations scrap their armaments down to the police level, with a reasonable probability of detecting significant evasion of violation through inspection arrangements. Security for the United States, as well as for other nations, could — again in theory — be assured by phasing out national forces only as international forces were satisfactorily in position and under the effective control of a “responsible” agency (although it should be clear that the notions of even a weighted majority as to what is “responsible” will not coincide every time with those of the United States). Technology may contribute to making the inspection task less onerous and less intrusive than at present, through robot mechanisms even now foreseeable. The political hurdle attending penetration of the Soviet Union may be further mitigated by such a move as unilateral American creation of an open world, so to speak, by making available to the United Nations all pictures taken by SAMOS and other observation satellites, of both the Soviet Union and the United States.

But none of this implies that total disarmament is a political possibility in the foreseeable future even though it is technically possible, and even though it is not unthinkable strategically given adequate supranational surrogates for national arms. It is to say that, without it, effective UN control is not possible.

UNIVERSALITY

The present roadblocks to universality in the United Nations are, first, the China problem, and second, the unwillingness of the Western powers to formalize the division of Germany, Korea, or Vietnam by consenting to their admission. As for the remaining areas not yet represented (now that the United States has held its nose and swallowed the admission to the UN of Outer Mongolia, as a source of potential nationalistic tension between China and Russia), virtually any territory that gains its independence, however small, nonviable, or incapable of governing itself, is fairly sure to be admitted to the society of nations under the present UN dispensation.

So to achieve the necessary universality, China and the divided countries would have to be either unified, or admitted to participation as presently divided. Unification of Germany, Korea, and Vietnam, and acceptance by each of the other’s continued existence, can be brought about only by conditions which are presently unlikely. To make disarmament and effective UN control dependent on solutions of those problems renders both prospects illusory (and it is indeed this logic which tends to discourage any serious thinking about either).

However, a global authority established with the consent of the great powers, even if those special problems had not yet been solved, could by its prima facie universality resolve the problem of representation. For unlike the conventional American view of the United Nations, membership in the new regime, far from being a privilege, would be mandatory. As indicated earlier, none of these problems would by themselves have to be finally solved in order to set up such an organization. But they would no longer be solvable by force.

FINANCES

The difficulty today of raising $8 million per month to finance the United Nations Congo operation contrasts vividly with a scheme whose monthly budget, according to our estimates, would be approximately a hundred times as great. All one can say is that, if agreement were reached on disarmament, with the great financial savings ensuing, and on the arming of an international authority, provisions would have to be made for funding it. Doubtless, those provisions would have to improve on the present method, and might work on a semi-automatic basis through percentages of national tax collections. In addition, revenue sources not tied to individual nations might be assigned to the central authority — e.g., tolls on international water-ways and revenues derived from res communis such as Antarctica, petroleum reserves under the high seas, space rights, etc. The point is that, if we can assume one, we have to assume the other. The same is true for other questions that arise in the implementation of the basic agreement. Provisions would simply have to be made for territorial enclaves adequate for the headquarters, military establishment, and the inspection organization. Other details would involve recruitment, deployment, procedure, codes, transport, communications, and the thousand and one details of government. Each of these matters poses inordinate difficulties. But the point is that they are not the first and prime matters to be solved. If the solution of the prior question can be assumed, there will be time enough for detailed blueprints.

REVISION OF THE UNITED NATIONS

As indicated earlier, there is no theoretical reason why the present United Nations could not be transformed by extensive Charter amendment into an instrument of effective global control. Alternatively, the process could be a completely new start, in the way the Articles of Confederation were scrapped to write the American Constitution. But it is not a terribly important point which method is used. The essential point is the transfer of the most vital element of sovereign power from the states to a supranational government.

It is clear that, under the hypothetical circumstances, even the problem of amending the present Charter (subject to the veto) is not particularly meaningful, for it puts the matter in the wrong perspective. The paramount issue in creation an “effective UN” would not be first of all the difficulty of amending the Charter, but that of reaching the political agreement and establishing new ground rules about the possession and use of military power in the world. If this were feasible, it would surely be a secondary question whether to incorporate the changes in the present Charter, or to write a new one. The overwhelming central fact would still be the loss of control of their military power by individual nations. If this becomes achievable, the details will not be insurmountable.

CHAPTER VI: EXPECTED PERFORMANCE OF THE MODEL

The model finally needs to be tested against major threats to its stability and integrity. This we can do using as criteria half a dozen familiar types of threats emanating from expansionist, imperialist, revolutionary, or other aggressive forces. First, however, a word about the source of such threats.

THE SOURCES OF THREAT

Among the prime assumptions made here is that the present ideological and power conflict may continue indefinitely into the future. But it is not enough of a test of the viability and durability of different kinds of international political and governmental arrangements that they be capable of countering communist aggression. The communist threat grows out of the existing world system and feeds on its weaknesses and imperfections. The inadequacy of the present system engenders tension and conflict which must be dealt with wholly apart from the communist problem. The degree to which any international system has stability and operates within a tolerable equilibrium defines the situation with which communism must deal, and thus the field within which communism (or any other political force) can operate aggressively.

The ability of a system to deal with such aggressive behavior depends to an important extent on the means by which it can resolve instabilities and disequilibria, the extent to which this is done preventively, the extent to which it can apply generally acceptable notions of justice, and its capacity to adapt flexibly to a changing environment. Thus an international system built and aimed exclusively at countering possible communist aggression, even through in the short run it performs its mission successfully, would not by itself satisfy the requirement for a durable and viable system. For a world system by definition addresses itself to the whole fabric of relationships between nations, between cultures, and between economic units; over time; and in the face of changing problems.

While the hypothetical system elaborated earlier must be tested against its capacity to respond to the kinds of threats we can presently envisage, there may be a different and unforeseeable order of threat to cope with, once one assumes a vastly different political setting. This dynamic quality could affect both communist threats and threats from other sources equally designed to disequilibrate, capture, or destroy the new system.

Finally, the choice is not necessarily between an international system incapable of coping with important threats and one which can deal successfully with every contingency in the spectrum. At one end of the scale, the present international system has some capacity to cope, even with communist menaces. At the other end of the scale, we can guess that there would be finite limits to the capacity of a supranational system to handle such maximum challenges as international civil war. A civil war, domestic or international, can gather such force as to end the preponderance at the center. The system impressionistically sketched out in this paper, while its capacities go significantly beyond those presently in sight, remains subject to the basic laws of political life.

How, then, might our model be expected to cope with major destabilizing actions on the part of individual nations?

Nuclear War – General and Limited

The proposed system would explicitly forbid national possession of weapons of mass destruction, of the means of delivery, and of the trained personnel required to mount an attack. Thus the component nations would not have the capability to wage strategic war as we now conceive it. The inspection system would be designed to minimize the possibility of successful evasion or violation of this prohibition. A capacity to threaten nuclear war would arise under two circumstances. One would be a successfully executed violation that evaded the detection system. The reserve nuclear deterrent at the center would be designed to deter surprise attack of this scale, and thus discourage such attempts in the first place.

The other potential for strategic war would arise from the deliberate, overt repudiation of the new order and the political system representing it. The erection of a system of government presupposes the will on the part of its members and its governing institutions to make it work. Making it work includes the enforcement of the laws and, above all, the organic law which gives the government both legitimacy and its relative monopoly of force. If the system did not abort such violation by imposing timely sanction upon a violator in the form of immediate seizure of the forbidden facilities, punishment of those responsible, etc., the danger to the nations who relied upon it would clearly be immense. To abdicate responsibility for self-preservation through a failure of nerve would confront the world with far worse perils than it now faces, given the marginal nature of the authority’s nuclear force. The ultimate question would then be the utilization of the international force after failure to use it preventively. The failure to make early use of initially superior forces to overcome a major violation of the established order is reminiscent of the 1930s. The details of such a scenario in the future are difficult to foresee. Can one postulate this time a more purposeful and intelligent governing mentality? The experience of the postwar period makes for moderate optimism on this score (offset, however, by the new dimension of war by accident).

In the end, dangers in such breakdowns of the system need to be measured against the dangers of breakdowns in the current international system, at the present level of armaments. On balance, if there were any reasonable chance of achieving the system adumbrated here, the hazards inherent in its possible later collapse through failure of nerve or will may well be out-weighed by the possibility that it would in fact work.

Conventional War

It would seem far more plausible for a threat to arise to the system in the form of hostile movements of armed men, i.e., through conventional warfare. Particularly in the first years after the establishment of the system, large numbers of trained men would exist in reserve in numerous countries. Even with internal security forces limited to sidearms and light field weapons, it would not be difficult for sizeable numbers of men to be recruited and armed clandestinely with (or even conceivably without) the connivance of national governments. Soviet man-power could under these circumstances make real the picture that always leapt into the Western mind when the Soviets called for nuclear disarmament: that of Soviet hordes overrunning Russia’s neighbors in Europe and the Middle East.

Once more, of course, the real test of the capacity of the system to cope with such a threat is a function not only of its military capability but of the purposefulness and determination behind it. Here again, history supplies mixed evidence. Under NATO, for example, the argument for a nuclear “shield” has been the threat of overwhelming conventional forces from the East. But, as in the 1930s, the truth is that the free nations actually enjoy a clear superiority, even in numbers of military-age youth, if only the West were to make use of it. If an act of aggression were to occur under the world government, and the responsible powers best able to influence the actions of the organization refused to use its powers, or were hopelessly divided, or were unable to enlist adequate support from the necessary majority of nations, the system would not respond “effectively.” No voting arrangements, however ingenious, could force a decision from an unwilling majority. In this sense the key to effective response does not lie in international parliamentary arrangement, any more than the problem in the 1930s was the requirement for unanimity in the League Assembly, or the reason for failure to act in Hungary in 1956 the Soviet veto in the Security Council.

If the political organs were unresponsive, it could not be expected that the civil servants of the proposed organization could automatically respond to aggression, any more than General MacArthur, for example, automatically responded to the Korean aggression without Washington’s orders, or Dag Hammarskjold responded with such powers as he then possessed to the British-French-Israeli military attack on Egypt in 1956. Constitutional arrangements and parliamentary rules, after all, go only a fraction of the total distance in determining the way in which the body politic as a whole will respond to a crisis. For purposes of analysis we assume that the system would work. We assume that its principal actors will have the determination to make it work in the face of a major assault on its integrity, in the same way the leaders of the Union reacted in 1861 or de Gaulle a century later. How, then, would the system cope with an armed attack by one nation on another or on the international force itself on a scale that could be plausibly prepared and executed by a nation subject to the system of inspection built into the program?

My undocumented conclusion is that trained and mobile conventional forces contemplated here should be adequate to counter a single surprise thrust of moderate dimensions. Ten air-transportable divisions, for example, trained for vertical envelopment and armed with the latest field weapons, transport, and communications should be able to cope with the sort of secretly prepared attack across one nation’s borders of the dimension likely under the circumstances. Beyond that, the strategic nuclear deterrent in the hands of the central authority would presumably deter conventional attack on a massive scale in the same fashion as in American hands it presumably deterred Soviet conventional aggression in Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (The latter analogy rests of course on an unproved hypothesis, as does the doctrine of massive retaliation associated with the preponderance in nuclear weapons.)

The international force would be decreasingly capable of coping with higher levels of aggression involving several countries, up to a point describable as true international civil war. This scenario is somewhat easier to depict. An outbreak of violence in many places of the globe, with national armies springing up, internal insurrection breaking out, national borders crossed in many places, and so on, poses an ultimately impossible task for the international force, even if it had not by that time been pre-empted, divided, or isolated.

The problem of United States security under such circumstances would then be acute. In some ways it would be analogous to the late 1930s, in other ways to the time of the Korean invasion. The alternatives confronting the United States would not be historically unfamiliar: the simple decision to rearm; whether to escalate the action on the ground with tactical nuclear weapons, or strategically with megaton weapons; or whether to beat a retreat, as in Indochina in 1954, Hungary in 1956, Tibet in the late 1950s, and Laos in 1961. These decisions in turn would depend on variables too numerous and complex to analyze here (although it would be illuminating to experiment with this novel policy problem through political gaming).

Proxy Aggression

Just as aggression by proxy leaves an escape hatch for the great power sponsoring it, so it enables an opposing power to intervene without seeming to challenge its adversary directly. The inhibitions on effective counteraction if Russia or China (or the US) were the aggressor might be appreciably less if done by proxy. In the Greek Civil War and the Korean action the doors remained open at all times for a truce or settlement without either great power having to admit defeat. US support of the rebel forces in Cuba in 1961 involved no real commitment.

If all nations were equally disarmed, however, proxy aggression takes a somewhat different meaning. One power cannot feed significant amounts of war material for use in a third area without soon establishing an observable violation — assuming, as we do, as efficient policing of disarmament. Proxy aggression thus seems an unlikely contingency.

Guerrilla War

This section and the next deal with the sort of conflict generally labelled “indirect aggression,” characteristically ambiguous as to national involvement, formal crossing of borders, and the like. Unconventional warfare between nations and, perhaps, against the central authority may well be the most characteristic type of conflict besetting our proposed system. Ability to cope with it will be subject to the same baffling complexities, uncertainties, and difficulties as torment us today in numerous areas. Whatever the international regime, we cannot safely predict an end to situations of civil war, rebellion, and other forms of internal instability. Nothing about a world government by itself alters the relation between blacks and whites in the Union of South Africa or Southern Rhodesia, or between French and Moslems in Algeria, leftists and rightists in Laos, between Serbs and Croats, Georgians and Great Russians, Austrians and Italians, Israelis and Arabs, Tibetans and Chinese, Moslems and Hindus, Turks and Kurds, etc.

So far as guerrilla warfare is concerned, a well-equipped and purposefully led guerrilla movement conducting irregular operations, living off the country, sabotaging a la Maquis, and, above all, favored by significant elements of the population, could tie up an international army just as easily as a national one, rendering its most potent weapons useless because inapplicable. Indochina, Malaya, Laos, and Lebanon all shared these characteristics in an important degree. None was a pure case of external aggression. All had international and internal ambiguities.

At the political level, the prospects for decisive management of this type of conflict are no clearer. For it must be assumed that ideological, racial, or cultural cleavages would divide a supranational legislature on such ambiguous charges of indirect aggression precisely as a United Nations General Assembly is today divided, and with the same disabling effects when it comes to preventive or enforcement action favoring one side or the other. No international system except a total tyranny complete with the apparatus of a police state would be capable of dealing with certainty with this type of disorder. The answer, if there is one, lies perhaps in peaceful change procedures to the extent that justice and equity can be meted to contending factions. Peaceful change procedures would also be relevant for legislating territorial changes where justified, as Israel, for example, was converted by UN statesmanship from a guerrilla force to a proponent of the established order. Procedures of this sort should, ideally, assure greater economic and social justice. (The international authority would, as noted, probably be limited in its powers to intervene in internal matters of domestic politics and economic and social policy, except insofar as international peace and security were jeopardized.)

On balance, provisions on a global scale for peaceful change and for responsive economic and social programs would go some distance toward removing the sources of conflict that characteristically underlie guerrilla war situations. But there remain the less complicated acts of aggression in the form of guerrilla warfare by a hostile, expansionist force such as international communism. An example might be the Huks in the Philippines in the 1940s. The international force should include a paramilitary capability to be used in appropriate circumstances. But there is no confidence that readier solutions would exist than at present. A system which limits the field of military action to guerrilla-type operations is probably an improvement over the present. But no system can wholly avoid the possibility of guerrilla-type problems arising from either source. It is not likely that an international authority would be more clearly capable of dealing effectively with all such threats than national governments have been able to do.

Subversion and Psychological Warfare

Everything that has been said about unconventional warfare applies here as well. At one extreme, a central authority might in theory operate a pervasive countersubversion net, creating a political-civil effect somewhere between the Holy Alliance and the Gestapo. At the other extreme, a world authority equipped only with carefully circumscribed powers to deal with formal acts of military aggression and breaches of the peace, even in a wholly disarmed world, would not be capable of coping at all with political subversion.

Under a system of reserved powers, subversion directed against a single government would be a problem for local authorities as before. Only if it involved more than one government would it become an international problem. If it were of the ambiguous type charged to the United Arab Republic (through Syria) in 1958, the appropriate counteraction would, as in Lebanon, appropriately take the form of observation along a border, or in a capital as in Amman in 1958, rather than the deployment of military force. International forces of a non-fighting variety could be utilized as adjuncts of the pacific settlement procedures by the organs of political investigation and pacific settlement, as the Security Council and Assembly used United Nations forces in Lebanon and, for that matter, in the Congo. Our postulated central authority would be as capable as the present United Nations to take such a situation under its cognizance and send observers to report. But we should be clear that its capacity would probably not be appreciably greater in a situation that resembled the Lebanese case in 1958, where a domestic population was almost evenly divided in a bitterly contested election.

For all the disorders of the oblique variety discussed in this and the previous section, it will undoubtedly remain true that the most meaningful answer lies in healthy, politically and socially coherent communities where conditions favoring internal disaffection and receptivity to subversion are held to a minimum. For the other kind — the malignant external pressure not primarily reflecting a lack of internal integrity and cohesion — there is an additional capacity that in the hands of the international authority would enable it to react effectively. That is the means to monitor and report to the executive authorities on hostile propaganda. The authority might also have in hand technical countermeasures, either direct jamming or adequate means of independent transmission, perhaps by 24-hour hovering satellites which would saturate the affected area with continuous FM or television information programs (although probably the rest of the world — at least one-third of it — would have to watch, too). One could conceive of simultaneous translation equipment in the receiving facilities. These possibilities, it should be said, exist today or will in the near future. World government is not needed to utilize them more effectively against subversive action in the form of international propaganda.

Threats to Use Force

As of April 1961, the Soviet Union had threatened nuclear destruction against various nations over 120 times. Without nuclear arms, or for that matter, any significant arms at all, such a policy would lose its present potency. The threat might well remain, but it would be a different one. It would lie in a given nation’s capacity to generate in secret enough of an independent military capability to impose — or threaten to impose — its will on other nations, on the central authority, or on the community in general. The ability to commit such a violation would depend on the comprehensiveness of the inspection system. The ability to get away with it would depend on the nerve and will of the rest of the community. To face down a Soviet or Chinese threat, backed by a suddenly unmasked stockpile of megaton rocket weapons, would require a high order of political courage and determination to resist.

It is conceivable that under such threat the United States would find that the community as a whole was paralyzed or at least bitterly divided as to whether to call the bluff. In this case the threatening power might safely take what it wanted. The threat, that is to say, might work. If the organs of the community failed to save its integrity, if above all the international force were not a guarantor against successful threat or blackmail, there might well be an irresistible demand within this country that the United States cease to reply on the world organization and once more look to its own defenses.

All of these contingencies depend on the Soviets — or anyone else — successfully concealing a violation to the point where a serious threat could be made. The inspection system might of course be inefficient, or incomplete, or even subverted. But we should, I think, also assume that the United States would continue to rely primarily on its own intelligence sources as a powerful supplement to the international monitoring of disarmament.

It seems hardly likely that any disarmament scheme would be acceptable otherwise. If this be assumed, then it becomes far more difficult to take the world by surprise with a military capacity in position, operational and targeted, sufficient to impose its will on the system, without having been discovered in preparation. Under these circumstances early discovery would be likely. In that case the violation would be either aborted or disavowed. If it were not, it must be assumed that appropriate sanctions would be undertaken unless the nations were totally unwilling to make their system work.

CHAPTER VII: CONCLUSIONS

Thus a hypothetical model can be constructed, fulfilling the characteristics of “a world effectively controlled by the United Nations.” But we are left with profound unanswered questions about it. There is the dilemma of its feasibility — the paradox that it is unattainable when needed, and unneeded when attainable. We concluded that in theory it could come about in the short, medium, or long run by a brink of war — or a war — combined with the development of evolutionary trends that might favor it as the time span stretches out.

The dilemma of scope is related. A global security system which comes about in the short-run future through crisis or by war, its ground rules agreed to at the moment of maximum strain, is likely to be very limited in its non-security functions (as well as being unpredictable in terms of future stability and viability). Conversely, a supranational authority that developed more naturally over time, since it would be more likely to rest on genuine consensus and would thus represent a truer community, would probably encompass more non-security functions, and would be more likely to live comfortably over time with the ground rules embedded in its enabling instruments. But that gets into a time period of no interest to us here.

There is the Aristotelian dilemma of corruption of government into tyranny and there is the potential conflict between a centralized authority and the deep American values of pluralism, diversity, and home rule. As with the American Constitution in the Federal period, once the constituent units relinquish their vital powers to the center, the extent to which encroachment is subsequently resisted, “states’ rights” maintained, and tyranny prevented will depend on factors other than the constitutional provisions agreed to. The lesson of historical experience is that how this happens depends not so much on the language of the organic instrument as on the degree of genuine consensus which went into its making. To the extent that the community is an artificial one, resting largely on fiat, or imposed on one important part of the whole by another important part — to that extent its real underpinnings are so much in doubt that its survival potential could not be predicted.

There is the dilemma of depending for effective world order on total national disarmament. Without disarmament, such a world system is probably unattainable. If general disarmament were ever a reality, a scheme such as that outlined in this paper will need to accompany and follow it. Otherwise, there will be no means to prevent exploitation of a disarmed world in a way which would almost surely bring on a war. The crucial point here is the provision for an effective international force equipped with approximately a half million men and a nuclear capability sufficient to deter any likely level of clandestine violation, a combination most likely to create a stable military environment.

And for the central authority to have nuclear weapons poses one of the most difficult questions about world government: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And perhaps even more to the point, how keep the keepers relatively insulated from the inevitable efforts to control them, wholly apart from the issue of their supervision?

But the details apart, two problems are sovereign. First is the quantum jump such centralization of military power would mean in historic terms. Second is the presently insurmountable difficulty of bringing into a world-wide system the messianic forces of the communist imperium so long as it is on the historic make. At present the very notion of a politico-military rubric superior to both East and West seems remote. By and large, there has been doctrinal continuity between Litvinov’s assertion that only angels can be impartial and Khrushchev’s statement to Walter Lippmann in April 1961 that there may be neutral nations but there are no neutral men. There are occasional indications that the Soviet Union agrees to an international force after disarmament (as in the third stage of the Soviet proposal of June 2, 1960). But it would be subject to the Security Council veto, and no real advance over Article 43 of the UN Charter agreed to in 1945. In addition, presently insurmountable problems seem to exist as to the sequence of disarmament and control.4

In sum, the structure of the model can be perceived more easily than the fundamental building blocks of consensus and community which would have to underlie it. But we must end by repeating that if such a system ever came into being, even in grave crisis, it would thenceforth have its own inner dynamic. New forces could be set into motion which we cannot now comprehend, leading in the direction of constitutional and organic development that might bear as little resemblance to the first stage as the United States system in 1961 bears to the thirteen colonies under the Articles of Confederation.

4. “…the formation of an international army before general and complete disarmament is effected would lead in practice either to the rise of unprecedented ‘super-militarism,’ if the international armed force were stronger than the armies of the Soviet Union and the United States, or to the perpetuation of extreme inequality in international relations if the international force were employed only against small and weak countries.” Y. Korovin, “Disarmament and Security,” International Affairs (USSR), February 1961, p. 57.