Canada

Mr. PEARSON remarked that all speakers in the opening general debate were emphasizing — and rightly so — the vital role of the United Nations in upholding and ensuring peace. The vital question was whether the United Nations was fulfilling that role, and whether it was being given a chance to do it. The answer was indicated by the fact that, five years after the end of the war, even the formal processes of peace-making had not yet been completed. Yet even had they been completed, there would be no assurance in the prevailing international atmosphere — a compound of suspicion and fear — that the United Nations could convert a technical peace settlement into something that would be more than the absence of armed conflict. The major problems of the post-war period remained unsettled, and the conditions that would make possible their solution did not seem to exist. It was with increasing concern, therefore, that the peoples of the world regarded those unsolved problems and watched the United Nations Assembly in its efforts to make a contribution to their solution. 119. It was necessary at the outset to make a careful re-appraisal of the policies, activities and procedures of the world Organization, and to ask what, in the circumstances, the United Nations might reasonably be expected to accomplish. 120. The Canadian Government had tried to make practicability the touchstone of its attitude towards the United Nations. Where it saw any real promise that a proposed course of action would contribute effectively to the solution of any particular problem, it was prepared to give it full support. On the other hand, it wished to avoid giving to the United Nations tasks that, in the light of the limitations under which it was suffering, and which must someday be removed, it was clearly unable to perform. It wished to be certain that, before any course of action was initiated, there was a reasonable expectation that it could be carried through to a good conclusion, and that the Members of the United Nations would support the Organization in that process. 121. Those were the principles which had guided the Canadian Government in determining more particularly the policy it should follow in the Security Council, where its first term of membership was about to end. 122. When it had accepted membership in the Security Council, the Canadian Government had been fully conscious of the great possibilities for good which the Council possessed. It had also known, however, that those possibilities would be largely nullified if the five permanent members were unable to work together on a basis of friendly co-operation and mutual concessions. Without such a basis, the veto would obviously be used to prevent political decisions being reached in the Council, and the Military Staff Committee would be unable to agree to put international force behind any decision, even if one were reached. 123. In spite of those handicaps, however, the majority of the members of the Security Council had tried to make it work as constructively as possible, and there had been some real successes. 124. As a consequence, the Council, although unfortunately still lacking the powers necessary to fulfil its primary function of maintaining peace and security, had worked out flexible and adaptable procedures which had often proved, effective and which at least constituted a useful method of doing international business. 125. In the existing international political situation, what was surprising was not that the Security Council had done so little, but that it had done so much. In particular, very valuable experience had been gained, and some good results achieved, in the handling of three troublesome and dangerous questions: Palestine, Indonesia and Kashmir. The Security Council had not solved any of those problems; it was clear that their ultimate solution must be worked out by the people who were directly responsible and whose daily lives were actually affected. The Council had nevertheless played an important role in preventing the outbreak of general war in all three areas. That had to be admitted even by those who were disappointed because the Council had not been able to take final and definite action in regard to any one of them. 126. The Canadian delegation hoped that, in carrying out its further responsibilities, the Council would be guided by certain principles of action Which had emerged in the course of the preceding two or three years. Those principles, in default of an improvement in relations between the communist and democratic worlds, would seem to mark the limit that could be reached at that time. 127. The first was that the Security Council should not initiate action it could not complete with its existing resources. The demand had often been made that the Security Council should intervene in some area or another with force, and that, when fighting occurred, the Security Council should take steps to halt it. There would be a great deal to recommend such intervention if it could be carried out firmly and quickly; but the fact was, of course, that the Security Council had at that time no effective way of imposing its will. In consequence in many cases it could do little more in the first instance than call upon the parties engaged in the dispute to stop fighting and start talking, offering them the means by which they might work out a settlement by negotiation rather than by conflict. That was not a dramatic or spectacular method of procedure, but in the circumstances it had served well. 128. The second principle which, in the Canadian delegation’s opinion, should guide the actions of the Security Council, was that the responsibility for solving a political problem should, to the greatest possible extent, be left with the people immediately affected by it. In respect of Palestine, Indonesia and Kashmir, for instance, it was still the case that the parties directly concerned and the people living in the area must seek to determine the measures by which peace might be maintained there. That was not only the most practical principle of action; it also revived and strengthened a sense of responsibility at the point where it was most vital to healthy political life, and it set the objectives of an agreed rather than an imposed solution. 129. The third general principle was that the Security Council should in all cases immediately use its influence to put an end to hostilities or disorders whenever they occurred. By insisting on that principle, and by insisting equally that fighting should be stopped without prejudice to the ultimate political solution, the Security Council had been on strong ground. It had not, of course, been able to command complete obedience. Fighting had recurred even in areas where a firm truce had seemed to have been established, and it had not been possible to guarantee absolutely that the ultimate outcome of a dispute would not be affected by the military action which had taken place. In general, however, the primary concern of the Security Council, namely, that peace should be kept while negotiations proceeded, had been respected and had contributed materially to the progress made in the settlement of disputes. The moral authority of the Organization was no slight thing, and no State, great or small, lightly disregarded its decisions. 130. It was an encouragement to those who believed in the United Nations and hoped for its success to observe the practical results of the application of the principles outlined. It was encouraging also to have found that, as demands had been made on the United Nations, people had come forward and offered their services, often in dangerous circumstances, in order to meet those demands. There was no greater evidence of the vitality of the United Nations and of the role which it might play in the world than the loyal service which it had been able to command from nationals of its own Members. 131. The task before the United Nations was great, and its responsibilities were likely to be steady and continuing rather than brief and episodic. For example, all three of the major subjects which had preoccupied the Security Council during the previous two years were related to one great, general and continuing movement. That movement arose out of the transformation of the colonial relationship between European peoples and the peoples of other continents into a new partnership of free communities. A great tide was moving in the affairs of men; it called for radical and complicated adjustment in political relationships. It was not surprising that the process of adjustment was producing strains and tensions, and that there was some impatience for greater speed. But every day brought new evidence that the process begun many decades before was accelerating and that a completely new relationship was being established between the peoples of the Western world and what had once been called dependent areas. The United Nations was playing an important part in that process. That was one of the reasons why the world should be most grateful for the existence of the Organization. 132. At the 226th meeting, as on many other occasions, the leader of the USSR delegation had accused the democracies of imperialism. The fact was, of course, that imperialism of the old kind was a rapidly diminishing force and a dying doctrine. The real danger lay in the new imperialism of the post-war period. During that period only one State in the world had extended its borders and the area of its domination. That State had annexed 179,000 square miles of territory, and had included within its borders in the preceding ten years more than twenty-one million people. Backed by its armies, it had imposed satellite regimes on neighbouring States. It had used its great material power and resources to impose its economic control on the peoples under its influence. Its leaders had talked freely of liberation and of national sovereignty, but its agents abroad had never hesitated to proclaim their obedience to its control and their determination to serve its interests above the interests of their own Governments and their own peoples. 133. How could there be a feeling of peace and security when an alien Power insisted on imposing its domination over other nations and peoples? The free democracies did not for a moment dispute the right of any State to maintain its own social and economic order, together with its territorial integrity. But they rejected the new imperialism which used the subversive forces of international communism to destroy the national independence even of communist States which would not accept its interference and its dictates. It was that new imperialism which the world watched with so much concern, partly because of its aggressiveness, partly because of its inherent instability. There was already evidence that because of its own internal weaknesses and contradictions it would not survive. As that new imperialism changed, a most just and equitable relationship among the States which it affected, might come about. Mr. Pearson hoped that the United Nations would be permitted to play a constructive role in that change, as it was doing in other areas where the old imperialism of earlier centuries was disappearing. 134. The leader of the USSR delegation had also made a strong plea for support of the United Nations. He had said that United Nations bodies in their existing form were most unsatisfactory, but his appeal for support and improvement of those bodies would have been more impressive if the Government which he represented had not refused to play any part in the United Nations specialized agencies which had been established since the war. That boycott extended even to those agencies dealing with questions of health and welfare, food and agriculture, civil aviation and cultural relations. A Government which followed that negative and sterile policy should not lecture the rest of the world on support for the United Nations or on the virtues of international co-operation. 135. The representative of the Soviet Union had also argued at that time, and in more detail on other occasions, that the international control of weapons of mass destruction must not bring with it encroachment upon national sovereignty. Such an insistence would make effective control futile and meaningless. It would be small comfort, if and when the first super-atomic explosion took place, to know that while everything else had been lost, national sovereignty had been saved. If a State put formal sovereignty before peace and security, then its support for international control of atomic and other weapons of mass destruction was hypocritical and meaningless. 136. The leader of the USSR delegation had also made a vigorous attack on warmongering, something which was, of course, generally detested and which must be combated from whatever source it came, whether from a bellicose general or a Cominform agitator. But Mr. Vyshinsky had ignored completely one despicable form of that crime against peace, namely, incitement to civil war, the direct attempt of one Government to destroy the authority of the Government of some other State by fomenting civil war. He had also ignored that kind of warmongering, which, by State decree and direction, poisoned the minds of peoples against each other; which prostituted the education of children to the end of aggressive ideological warfare; the kind of warmongering which distorted and misrepresented history, science and even letters in the interest of national policy and which prevented international understanding and co-operation by spreading a blanket of fear, ignorance and isolation over the minds and bodies of its people. 137. The leader of the delegation of the Soviet Union had made a plea for peace and had said that his country remained faithful to the principles of international co-operation. He could be assured of Canada’s devotion to those ideals, and if the Canadian Government was sceptical of their acceptance by some others, that scepticism could be easily removed when performance matched promise. Mr. Vyshinsky had quoted the head of his Government as having said that the USSR was for peace; but there had been other statements from that same source, meant not for foreign but for home consumption, which had preached the gospel of inevitable and bitter conflict. Which was the world to believe? 138. The smaller Powers knew, with a special feeling of dread, that there was no real peace in the world but fear and insecurity. They knew that there was a great menace to their free institutions, their security, their very lives in the aggressive and subversive force of international communism which had behind it all the resources of a great Power, the most heavily armed Power in the world, where every male inhabitant was dedicated and trained to the military or other service of his Government from the cradle to the grave. When some States, knowing that there was at the moment no prospect of universal collective defence through the United Nations, attempted to remove or alleviate fear by banding together in a pact which would make possible at least some collective resistance against aggression, the attempt was branded as aggressive and contrary to the Charter. The repetition of that charge did not make it true, especially when it was made by those who had already worked out a whole network of treaties and alliances in eastern Europe, only a few of which had been registered with the United Nations., 139. If and when the United Nations could organize effective arrangements few defence against aggression on a universal basis, all other alternative and second-best arrangements would have to be scrapped. In spite of all obstacles, all efforts should be directed to that end. Until it had been achieved, however, collective force, on a narrower front, should be put behind the will for peace. The actions of the North Atlantic nations would be the best proof that their intentions were not aggressive. They were willing to accept that test; others would also be judged by their actions and not by their words. 140. That test could be applied, for instance, to the proposals submitted to the General Assembly by the delegation of the Soviet Union (226th meeting). 141. The first proposal, by singling out two Member States for condemnation as warmongers, was obviously intended for propaganda and not for peace. 142. The second laid down, as the condition for prohibition of atomic weapons, a system of adequate and rigid international control. The majority in the Assembly had already translated those words into express conditions which represented the requirements for effective control and prohibition. If the USSR accepted those conditions, progress could be made in that most vital matter. If it did not, then its proposal did not achieve anything except, once again, in the field of propaganda. 143. The third proposal was an appeal to the Members of the United Nations — and especially to the permanent members of the Security Council — to settle differences peacefully. That specific obligation had already been assumed by all Member States by acceptance of the Charter. Furthermore, the inclusion of the words “the mighty popular movement… for peace and against the warmongers”, which had a peculiar meaning in the communist lexicon, seemed to bring that proposal also into the field of propaganda. 144. If the practice of introducing proposals for propaganda purposes persisted, the Assembly would find it difficult to make that contribution to peace which was so ardently desired. In spite of all obstacles, however, the task must be everlastingly continued. Only by so doing could there be maintained, in the minds and hearts of all peoples, faith in the United Nations as the best — possibly the only — hope for the prevention of a war, which, if allowed to occur, would engulf and destroy all mankind.