UNsettled

Amidst the plethora of well-intentioned speeches that marked the first sessions of the United Nations General Assembly, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov's survey of the situation confronting the world peacemakers stands in real contrast to the polished platitudes of striped-trousered diplomats. No one has stated the problem of atomic control and the veto so thoroughly, nor probed to the heart of so many of the questions dividing East from West. But on both these major issues--which might be considered one in essence--Molotov carried his thinking only to the limits established by his own frame of reference.

The Russian delegate concluded that elimination of the veto power, either in the Security Council or in the Atomic Energy Authority, would mean the end of the United Nations. With unanswerable logic, but again only within the limits of his own hypothetical alternatives, he pointed out the absurdity of majority rule in which the vote of Honduras is equal to that of the United States or the ballot of Haiti holds as much weight as that of the Society Union. Therefore, he said, the only possible hope for peace lay in Big Five unanimity.

In a preceding evaluation of the League of Nations, Molotov had unwittingly shown the fallibility of the very principle he is so valiantly upholding. The League failed, he demonstrated, because it was based on the tenet of the "unanimity of all its members in the adoption of decisions." The structure of the UN is an improvement over the defunct League in the reduction of the same principle to a scale of five powers. But from the record of the Security Council's first year, it is apparent that reaching agreement among five great nations is as difficult as it is among fifty small ones, most of which cast their ballots in sympathy with one or another of the major powers.

On the one hand, then, we have the absurdity of placing unequal nations on an equal plane, and on the other, an impracticable principle of unanimity among powers who, as reasonable men may, disagree on many questions. Neither Molotov, nor all the representatives who have been clamoring for restriction of the veto, seem to have realized the further implications of its removal: that if a world organization is to consider making decisions by a majority, it is necessary that the votes of the various nations bear some relationship to their power, population, and consequent importance in world politics; in short, some form of proportional representation with individual representatives, not states, casting the ballots.

Whether Molotov has considered this implication or not, his prophecy that the elimination of the veto would mean the end of the United Nations applies to the idea with curious irony. Such a step as proportional representation would indeed mean the end of the United Nations--a United Nations whose Statement of Purposes contains the utterly anachronistic "sovereign equality of all member nations"--but an end, despite the difficulty of its attainment, that would be a new beginning.