The United Nations and National Loyalties

Abstract

many years, attempts to establish international standards of law, government, and administration, have had to struggle with the traditions and prejudices of nationalism. International lawyers and reformers have been preoccupied with the problem of national sovereignty, the unwillingness of nation states to surrender any power of decision to another body. In recent years earlier efforts to work out blueprint constitutions for world government, world federation or other forms of direct assault upon national sovereignty have receded. Hopes have been centred upon the functional approach, the international institution which is concerned with a specific problem such as defence, food distribution, settlement of refugees, education or international aviation. The tension between international and national sovereignty has not lost any of its importance, but the strategy has changed. The predominant pattern of post-war international organization has been along these lines. A series of functional agencies has been grouped around the United Nations Organization. Most of them, like the Food and Agricuture Organization, the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization, have only advisory functions, but they have struggled, and to a considerable extent succeeded, in laying the foundations of a genuine internationalism, of enterprises in which men and women of different nationalities work together in a common task. Most of these agencies follow the same pattern. The general assembly consists of national delegations which usually meet once every year. A smaller executive board is formed from these delegations, but without any doubt the heart of all these international agencies, and in particular of the United Nations itself, is the permanent secretariat, the full-time staff of international employees under the direction of a director-general, or a secretary-general. The permanent staff of the League of Nations had developed a genuine esprit de corps, and the I.L.O. was able to preserve itself beyond the collapse of the League of Nations and through the second world war because it has a nucleus of international civil servants. Article 100 of the United Nations Charter reflects the importance attributed by the founder members to the independence of the Secretary-General and his staff : 1. In the performance of their duties the Secretary-General and his staff