Do global technologies require global politics?

Abstract

During the generation since the United Nations system was built, we have been building peace in parcels. These parcels are of functional sizes and shapes -institutions designed to be wrapped around particular technologies. ’ President Franklin D. Roosevelt, preoccupied with postwar planning even as he was managing a global war effort, was mindful of the sour comment of John Maynard Keynes that the failure of this century’s first try at world order, at Versailles, was due to the lack of “concrete ideas . . . for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments which [Woodrow Wilson] had thundered from the White House. ’ ’ ‘That is why Roosevelt early developed the principle (which he practiced but was careful not to preach) that an ultimate pattern of peace must be put together over a period of time out of its major fragments. It was too much, he felt, to build a peace all at once, in a single stroke of diplomacy, from such a ruin as World War II might make of the world. In the early years of postwar planning, therefore, the planning was in bits and pieces, reaching into every specialized corner of the government. The dynamics of specialist enthusiasm would be used to provide motive power for building the peace; the vehicles of peace would take the form of international organizations for special as well as general purposes, for technical as well as political functions. We can see now that it was clearly a good thing for the pattern of peace to develop in a fragmented way. It was much easier to reach international agreement in the relatively ‘ ‘safe,’ ’ relatively non-political subjects with which the UN’s Specialized Agencies deal. The world of the 1940s and 1950s was far from ready for an enforcible peace system, and progress in one field of endeavor could not be made to depend on simultaneous progress in all the others.