First of all, I should like to join my congratulations to those Sir Leslie Munro has received from other delegations upon his election to the high office with which this Assembly has honoured him. It is a fitting tribute to him and to his country, New Zealand, which has distinguished itself by its consistently co-operative attitude in the United Nations.
2. I should also like to congratulate the Secretary-General, Mr. Hammarskjold, upon his reappointment for another term; it is a deserved acknowledgement by the General Assembly of his abilities and the competence with which he is discharging his important functions.
3. I am likewise pleased to welcome the new Member State, the Federation of Malaya, now a partner in the British Commonwealth of Nations as the result of agreement with the United Kingdom, which has once again demonstrated its liberal and forward-looking policy.
4. Year after year new States enter the United Nations. Yet there is one exception which becomes increasingly evident owing to the importance of the State concerned and the arbitrary reasons for its exclusion. I need hardly add that I refer to Germany, part of whose territory has been governed for the past twelve years by a foreign Power which refuses to withdraw its troops, thus preventing reunification. No one can deny the right of Germany, like any independent nation, to choose its own government with power over the whole of its territory by free elections. Nor has it less right to membership in the United Nations, which remains an incomplete organization without the most important State of Central Europe. My delegation hopes that Germany will be reunified and subsequently admitted to the United Nations.
5. The Argentine Government, faithful to its undertakings and to the principles of the Charter, followed with deep concern the serious events which last year imperilled world peace.
6. The Suez crisis was resolved because the States which had intervened in Egypt complied with the General Assembly's resolutions. The same did not occur in Hungary, which is still occupied by foreign military forces despite repeated resolutions condemning the Soviet Union's aggression and urging the Soviet Government to withdraw its forces.
7. Last year's session opened in an atmosphere of alarm. This Assembly is starting in an atmosphere of anxiety: anxiety concerning Hungary and the Middle East; anxiety concerning the deadlock in disarmament negotiations; lastly, anxiety concerning the unpredictable events which may result from the expansionist policy of a great Power which is seeking world supremacy and uses force without regard for the principles of justice and humanity.
8. In the course of this general debate [681st meeting], the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union spoke with commendable moderation. Unfortunately, however, that does not change his country's position with respect to the serious international problems before this Assembly. The USSR representative stated: "In all its actions in the international arena, the Government of the Soviet Union is guided by the doctrine of Lenin, the founder of our State, regarding the need for peaceful co-existence between countries, irrespective of their social systems."
9. May I say that the endorsement of Lenin is hardly soothing to anyone who knows his doctrine. For the Bolshevik leader said: "Replacement of the bourgeois State is impossible without a violent revolution ...For all these reasons, the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary, and victory over the bourgeoisie is impossible without a prolonged, tenacious, and desperate struggle to the death; a struggle which calls for calm, discipline, firmness, inflexibility and single-mindedness." And his book Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism. referring to the monopoly of certain industries under the capitalist system, Lenin says: "These results prove that so long as the economic basis does not disappear, so long as the means of production continue to be privately owned, capitalist wars are entirely inevitable."
10. I do not see how those ideas can be reconciled with the peaceful coexistence of countries with different social systems.
11. The Soviet delegation has submitted a draft declaration [A/3673] whereby the General Assembly would call upon all States to base their mutual relations upon the following principles: "mutual respect for one another's territorial integrity and sovereignty; non-aggression; non-intervention in one another’s domestic affairs on any economic, political or ideological grounds whatsoever; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence."
12. The Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, in his eloquent speech, expressed [685th meeting] the amazement caused by that declaration. It could hardly be otherwise when we recall that the proposed declaration, which is in essence a repetition of the basic principles of the Charter, is presented by the State guilty of aggression in Hungary and the occupying Power of eastern Germany.
13. Among the items included in our agenda, by far the most important is the limitation of armaments, an agonizing problem which has been discussed for years now by the great Powers, but which affects all States because not one of us could escape the formidable destructive power of modern weapons if war should break out. As the Secretary of State of the United States, Mr. Dulles, said: "Humanity faces a tragic future if the war threat is not brought under control. It would mean that men, in order to survive, must learn to live as burrowers within the earth's surface to find protection against death" [680th meeting, para. 361.
14. It is self-evident that unless mutual confidence is restored, there can be no agreement on disarmament. Yet the mutual distrust between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union makes it imperative to introduce control, though that is difficult enough in the case of armaments and even more difficult in the case of atomic and thermonuclear weapons.
15. An eminent jurist and former judge of the International Court of Justice, Charles de Visscher, in a recent book which has already become a classic, advocates international control and lucidly analyses its implications. He says: "Control, assuming it to be technically feasible, in the atomic and even more in the thermonuclear field, implies genuine co-operation at all stages: agreement on the functions of the control organs; agreement on the permanent stationing and powers of inspection of the control agents; agreement on their competence to decide on the spot the immediate or at least temporary cessation of any prohibited manufacture. "Such strict control", adds the learned professor of the University of Louvain, "requires not only the elimination of existing antagonisms, but also a high degree of mutual trust constantly kept alive by a clear awareness of the common danger. It is therefore obvious that nothing effective will be done unless there is a general and rapid relaxation of the present tension in political relations. In essence, the problem of control is political, so much so that it raises the question whether the establishment of genuinely effective control does not, in the final analysis, require a renunciation of the very concept of national sovereignty and an entirely new approach to the relations between nations."
16. But the problem of disarmament cannot be considered to be resolved merely by ceasing the manufacture of atomic weapons. The discontinuance of atomic tests proposed by the Soviet Union would be no more than a first step towards a broader, general plan prohibiting the use of weapons, bombs and missiles the horror of whose destructive power is still fresh in the minds of the peoples who lived through the Second World War.
17. The armaments race is a crushing burden on the world economy. The military budgets of the great Powers run into thousands of millions. The astounding technological advances in arms production force the Powers into constant renewal of their war materiel. The battleships, submarines and bombers built a few years ago are now obsolete, and the same is true of weapons of all kinds. Astronomical sums have been wasted on war machines which soon become antiquated. It is distressing to think of the benefits humanity might have derived from those thousands of millions spent on means of destruction.
18. Economic and social agreements are more feasible than political or military agreements. In both those fields, the United Nations has achieved positive results which demonstrate international solidarity.
19. Among the plans recommended to this Assembly, one of the most important is that proposing the establishment of a Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development (SUNFED). The plan was presented by the Netherlands delegation at the twenty-fourth session of the Economic and Social Council, with the co-sponsorship of Argentina, Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Mexico and Yugoslavia. After an exhaustive debate in plenary meeting, in which the eighteen member delegations took part, it was adopted by 15 votes to 3, [99th meeting] the opposing votes being cast by Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. The three negative votes were based more on reasons of timeliness than of substance, since all delegations agreed on the need for external assistance to the less developed countries.
20. In view of the difficulties of establishing the Fund with substantial capital, precisely because of the investments in arms, my delegation proposed the establishment of a body with fewer functions and a smaller membership to be responsible for promoting the financing of genuinely effective projects to stimulate the productivity of the economically weak countries.
21. The Argentine proposal, which I had the honour to introduce at the 992nd meeting of the Economic and Social Council during the debate on the international financing of economic development, was accepted by the sponsors as an addition to the original proposal. What is now recommended is that the General Assembly should set up a preparatory commission with the following functions: to prepare the necessary measures for the establishment of SUNFED; and to select a limited number of projects to be financed on an experimental basis by voluntary contributions until such time as the Fund begins full operation.
22. The large majority which supported the proposal in the Council leads us to believe that it will also be supported in this Assembly. The establishment of SUNFED will fill a need felt by the under-developed countries. My delegation's efforts on behalf of the resolution adopted in Geneva were completely disinterested since, as I brought out at the time, Argentina is not one of the countries which will either contribute to the Fund or benefit by it.
23. The United Nations, which was founded in 1945 with fifty-one States Members, now has a membership of eighty-two, among them important Powers recently admitted. There is no doubt that so great an increase in membership should be offset by a proportionate increase in the number of members of the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council, which have eleven and eighteen members respectively. There is no reason why the Charter should not be revised to that effect with a view to broadening cooperation in those important organs of the United Nations.
24. It has become the custom to bring before this Assembly internal matters or international disputes which it cannot settle. When the parties concerned secure the required majority, the Assembly confines itself to making a moral recommendation which has the effect of widening differences rather than reducing them and serves only to embitter debate. The Secretary-General, in his clear introduction to his annual report [A/3594/Add.1] has reminded us that the United Nations, as an entity, is not a super-State and does not have the powers of a super-State. And that is even more true of the Assembly, whose powers are limited under the Charter.
25. I cannot conclude without expressing my country’s fervent hope that this Assembly will accomplish constructive work not only in the economic and social fields, but in the political field as well. The world still hopes for an agreement among the great Powers on disarmament which will remove the nightmare of war and tremendously relieve the burden of military expenditure. Agreement is difficult, but not impossible if the negotiating parties will only reflect on the horrors of a third world conflict, a war of annihilation for victors and vanquished alike. The supremacy of might is precarious. Once the struggle is over, there arise, from among the ruins and the dead, the same conflicts of interest, the same antagonisms, the same problems which destruction and violence could not resolve and never will be able to resolve. Let the great Powers reach that agreement and they will have earned the gratitude of all mankind, which will then be able to devote itself to fruitful labour in the serene atmosphere of peace without fear.