Lord Home's UN

Lord Home is a man who thinks that the United Nations is carrying things too far, and next week in Washington he will no doubt say so to President Kennedy. In past weeks, the British Foreign Secretary has made it noisily clear that he thinks the UN should leave the settling of small power aggression and crises in general to the great powers of the world. Plainly, he favors a mediating, conciliatory UN executive, and doesn't like the increasingly activist role that the Congo crisis has forced upon it. And, he has said over and over again, the reckless, sloganeering anti-colonialism of the world body's newer members leads them to adopt a deplorable double standard of international morality.

In all this there is much truth, but it is an irritatingly useless kind of truth, and President Kennedy should be able to tell Lord Home why: whatever the theoretically proper thing to do, the great world powers are simply not capable of acting together on issues like Goa or the Congo. The Cold War and their own conflicting interests cripple them. Thus, Lord Home's eagerness to discredit an admittedly flawed United Nations makes him forget that it is the only instrument the world has at the moment. In the Congo, it may even be succeeding in establishing peace--which is surely more than any great power action there could do. (Parenthetically, one hopes that Kennedy will ask him why his government, which was, of all the Western powers, in the best position to put private pressure on Nehru, failed to do so.)

One hopes that Kennedy will sharply remind Lord Home that Britain's record in recent months is no testimony to its honesty or its good sense. With France, England has done its best to sabotage the UN effort in the Congo. and, if Lord Home's fears that the United Nations was establishing a dangerous precedent in taking sides rather than mediating were theoretically valid, they were never very relevant. The United Nations had no choice but to act as it did: to create a viable Congolese state, and keep the Cold War out of the Congo, the UN had to assume responsibility for law and order and crush a Tshombe who refused to negotiate. Lord Home's government was thus both wrong and dishonest: its attempt to subvert a set of UN resolutions it hadn't the courage to veto is in itself an apt lesson in hypocrisy for the "reckless" anti-colonialists to ponder.

The UN's purpose in such situations is to prevent international violence, or, if violence comes, to restrict it. Lord Home is quite right when he warns that tacit approval of Nehru's Goan adventure will open the door to a perilous new era of petty wars and territorial brigandage. But he is quite wrong in thinking that there is an alternative to the UN. Dag Hammarskjold wanted an active, vigorous UN executive who would settle explosive situations before international violence broke out--this concept is plainly offensive to Britain's Foreign Secretary. If the UN adopted the British theory of being simply conciliatory, simply a mediator, in the Congo, then it is fair to predict that the Cold War would become even more involved there.

The UN is succeeding in the Congo and has failed in Goa. This is a decent average, and Lord Home should not be so quick to criticize. He should worry, as Adlai Stevenson has done, about how to strengthen the UN executive, so that there is a possibility of its acting consistently for peace.