Hoffman Discusses Fate of UN In Time of Cold War Instability

Dag Hammarskjold's death has not created any great new crisis for the United Nations, simply because it has not fundamentally changed the nature of the organization or its capabilities, a University expert on international relations declared yesterday.

"The U.N. is going to go on, but with the same procession of ups and downs it has seen for the last 15 years," Stanley H. Hoffman, associate professor of Government, told the Hillel Round Table of World Affairs.

The U.N.'s main problem is not the loss of its Secretary-General, he said, but a general misunderstanding of the organization's capabilities and limitations.

Hoffman maintained that the U.N. was "built for a world which never came into being." Big Five unity crumbled, and control of the organization fell to a "coalition of states which did not even exist at the time of the San Francisco conference."

Although it was created to operate in an atmosphere of stability, the U.N. has had to work in a heterogeneous world in which there is only one stable element--fear of general war.

In such a world, the U.N. continues to exist only because its existence has become a necessity for each of the three major blocs, Hoffman declared. For the West, the U.N. provides the only instrumentality for keeping limited wars in former colonial areas from developing into a nuclear holocaust; for the Russians, it presents a splendid opportunity to "fan the flames of discontent arising from colonial oppression"; and for the neutrals, it provides a place to "hide from the cold war."