When I had the honour of addressing the General Assembly at the first part of its first session in London, I had occasion to express certain ideas illustrating the Peruvian delegation’s point of view on the international situation at that moment. I am going to do so again today and, through force of circumstances, I must revert to the same subjects.
I said then that, within the Organization of the United Nations, it was of fundamental importance that, on the one hand, the great Powers should realize that any abuse of their rights and privileges would lead to international dictatorship, and that, on the other hand, the small nations should be alive to the fact that any excessive ambition would lead to international anarchy. I added that the avoidance of an international dictatorship, which is the guarantee of the survival of an international democracy, requires that these two groups should keep within their reasonable limits. If either of them should overstep those limits, by an abuse of the rights derived from new treaties or by giving too free a rein to that ambition which is latent in individuals and nations alike, neither group could fulfill its historic task.
From London to New York, international relations have followed a short but eventful path. The great Powers, or some of them, have marked their supremacy in world questions in a manner that surely is derived from an excessive interpretation of the facts and from excessive sensitiveness placed at the service of excessive ambition.
Thus, the danger of disproportionate claims which might have logically been expected on the part of the small States, whose international positions had been collectively and individually impaired, proved to be, in reality, a further manifestation of the supremacy of the great Powers, and has increased the privileges which they derived from victory as well as from the rights conferred on them by the Charter of the United Nations.
Thus, too, the lack of international harmony has been expressed in the opposition or contrast of the interests of the great States. The differences created by the new Organization, which were principally of a juridical type, are now being extended to the point that they threaten to create a spiritual abyss. Thus, finally, the right of the veto, which the small States accepted as an inevitable consequence of the antecedents of the new international status, appears not to be limited — either in reality or in intention — to the problems capable of affecting the security of the great States, but rather to be extended to other questions, where, from an objective point of view, it is quite unjustified.
More than this, the small States would have reason to think that the international inequality established by the San Francisco Charter — there is no point in using euphemisms — is not limited to the inevitable manifestations of superiority of power and greater importance of interests, but that all the expressions of equality, in so far as they are not purely the declaratory formulae of international protocol, are foundering completely as a result of the absorption by the major Nations of all international direction and of their desire to play a preponderant role in international life.
This undermining of international equality finds expression in an attitude which is all the more dangerous because it is assumed without immediate reasons of contiguity or common interests, but rather for political and social reasons of an ideological or doctrinaire type.
Today, all the major international issues under consideration or review which have arisen as a result of the recent great war, are not submitted or discussed or settled on grounds of strict justice, nor in the form best calculated to ensure future peace, nor even by taking primarily into consideration human rights, whose assertion was the fundamental cause of the struggle against the defeated nations and the decisive impulse towards victory.
Solutions of these important international questions are governed by two basic but morally weak considerations. In the first place, the interests of the great States are judged exclusively by themselves in pursuance of a policy of domination. In the second place, questions are settled in the light of ideologies which, with different form and content, again oppose each other in history, in the same way that the spirit of the French Revolution opposed the spirit of the Holy Alliance in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the spirit of domination of peoples and subjugation of individuals is opposed by the spirit of international democracy and the affirmation of human rights in this first half of the twentieth century.
We must not forget that there are many small States which, either under the Versailles Treaty or the San Francisco Charter, provisionally surrendered their strong and invincible desire for international equality, because they believed that this equality was not possible without an organized juridical order which would constitute an effective partnership, for the establishment of which it was necessary to accept, owing to existing circumstances, the supremacy of power; but they accepted it believing that it was only temporary, until such time as international justice was able, increasingly, to assume the functions which meanwhile were entrusted to a power under the guarantee that they would be used solely in upholding the law.
We must understand the opposition to the veto, which is now becoming general, as an act of urgent rebellion and also as a reaction which grows in, proportion as the veto is being more widely abused.
If the veto continues, or is liable, to be exercised in an extensive way and in a manner contrary to its only acceptable basis, which is a genuine and prudent conception of security, a new generation of statesmen, politicians and jurists, and what is even more serious, a new generation of human beings will have failed not only to realize the splendid Wilsonian ideal of making the world safe for democracy, but also in the ideal of Franklin Roosevelt that men should be able to live without fear.
We should then only be replacing the extinct Versailles Covenant, which, juridically allowed action against the disturber of international peace, by a Charter that would permit the veto and a sort of medieval jurisdiction under which the great nations would be beyond the reach of justice. And this same justice, represented principally by the International Court, would not have made, as indeed it has not made, any positive step towards asserting its authority with respect to the category or type of disputes with which it should deal, and towards the exercise of this authority over all the members of the family of nations.
Two essential conditions, among many others, must be fulfilled if the United Nations Organization is to grow in scope and strength until it becomes the comprehensive and all-embracing framework of the international community. One of them is the effort — which may be slow, but must be effective — towards the universality of the Organization. This requires that it should become more and more an association of all peoples, through their representative elements which are their Governments; and less and less an instrument for perpetuating the political and material advantages derived from victory.
Peru believes that all States must gradually come to form part of the United Nations, provided that their political system is not opposed to the new fundamental principles of the international community. In the first place, of course, there are all those that were not belligerents but whose neutrality was, in many cases, a contribution to victory and a valuable asset in circumstances which might have turned out differently if, at the critical moment, these States had yielded to the mirage of an anti-democratic victory or to the threatening pressure of force.
Another condition necessary for the development and strengthening of the United Nations is that no international agreements creating a new legal status should be concluded outside the Organization.
There is no longer security for the future of peace and civilization — regarded from the point of view of the intellectual and material progress of mankind — in agreements or treaties which, under the exclusive influence of great Power interests, create for the defeated nations — which no longer exist as governments but which are continuing and will continue to live as peoples, under the political forms determined by the victor — conditions of life which, under the guise of being vague, are as arbitrary and absurd as those which furnished the ostensible and yet undeniable excuse for the re-appearance of the frenzied nationalism which upet the uneasy balance of world peace established in 1918, because the treaties then concluded failed to safeguard the peace.
We see with alarm that questions which should be principally considered from the point of view of human values, such as those of devastated areas and displaced persons, refugees and reparations, are apparently being considered from the political standpoint of conflicting interests and ideologies.
We believe that there are two questions on the agenda of this Assembly that transcend incidental considerations and affect the very existence of the United Nations itself: the specific question of the veto and the general question of the revision or correction of the San Francisco Charter.
With regard to the first, that is the question of the veto, we have already stated our views on the principle or substance of the matter. We believe that the purpose of the United Nations is to achieve a gradual substitution of the supremacy implicit in the veto, which means putting international politics first, by an extension of international justice applied equally to all States by all States. But we think that the disturbance in the world and the danger to peace are so great at this moment that it would be inopportune and imprudent to try to deprive the great Powers at present of a legitimate instrument of security which has been recently given to them after consideration of the immediate facts.
We must test the sincerity and the loyalty of the great Powers by the supreme standard of international justice, inviting them not to use the veto except in cases where they consider their security directly at stake. We believe the concept of security should be objective rather than subjective, and that it should be governed by actual threats or real danger and not by arbitrary inferences which are an insincere way of affirming or extending another kind of interest. If the great Powers use the veto only to protect their own security they will have the moral approval of the world, which carries such weight whenever their security is offered as an argument.
With respect to the revision of the Charter of San Francisco, we think that it has defects capable of being corrected without endangering good international relations, and that there will always be room for suggestions and possibilities of improvement; but we believe that its juridical architecture is still too fragile and that the re-establishment of peace within an equilibrium of interests is still too recent to run the risk of reopening the debate on the San Francisco Charter, at a time when full stability has not yet been reached and interests are still expanding.
With eloquence and sincerity, the President of the Assembly, in the speech that he made on the opening day of this session, recognized frankly that the United Nations lacked an atmosphere of confidence and support from world public opinion. This is a fact from which we may draw a further conclusion. It is not the fault of the small States that public opinion has as yet no faith in the United Nations. It is the fault of the great Powers.
Having set forth some general ideas on what we consider to be the essential factors influencing the life of the United Nations, the Peruvian delegation, in accordance with the suggestion that each State should confine itself to what it considers strictly necessary to express its views in the general debate, has placed its own on record, in the hope that they may be accepted as an honest contribution to the common good. We have used language which, we are sure, corresponds to the feelings of the majority and which we should sincerely like to see employed more frequently, shunning not the light or publicity but darkness and silence.