The United Nations: A Proposal for International Security

Abstract

FOR more than five years of war, the conditions of peace and the means and organization to ensure peace have been discussed with a thoroughness and earnestness accentuated if anything by the vicissitudes and ordeal through which the United Nations have passed. The causes of the failure of the League of Nations have been probed and analysed dispassionately, and the reasons for the comparative success of other international agencies such as the International Labour Organisation have been scrutinized with the view of throwing the fullest light on the principles to be served in any subsequent attempt to build a new world organization. Even at the end of 1939, serious studies were being initiated by Political and Economic Planning and by the Royal Institute of International Affairs into the various aspects of international co-operation. The quality of the resultant studies and much of the voluminous literature of the ensuing years, with such outstanding books as Prof. E. H. Carr's "Conditions of Peace", Lord Cecil's "A Great Experiment", Mr. Harold Butler's "The Lost Peace" and Mr. R. M. Reyner's "The Twenty Years' Truce", has reached a level that provides solid ground for believing that a much more scientific approach to the whole question of world organization has become possible.