STRUCTURE OF THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES TO THE UNITED NATIONS The committee convened at 10 a. m. in the caucus room, House Office Building, Hon. Charles A. Eaton (chairman) presiding. Chairman EATON. The committee will be in order. I will ask Dr. Paul Shipman Andrews, dean, School of Law, Syracuse University, to take the stand. STATEMENT OF DR. PAUL SHIPMAN ANDREWS, DEAN, SCHOOL OF LAW, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY Chairman EATON. Dr. Andrews, we are very glad to welcome you to our midst. Dr. ANDREWS. Thank you, sir. I would like to tell you, if I may, sir, why I and men wiser than I believe in a federal world government as proposed in House Concurrent Resolution No. 59-not as proposed in No. 163. I am speaking on behalf of the United World Federalists but not as an official representative in any way. Officially I speak for myself. Charles P. Taft said one time, that in America, things often have to become very bad indeed before they can become very good indeed. He was referring, I think, to the moral pressure which exists when things do get very bad, the driving force which impels people to make them better. Conditions in the world obviously are very bad indeed. I really do not need to review in this presence, the effect of the atomic bomb, the assurance of more powerful atomic bombs, the fact that atomic spray raised from a bomb in New York Harbor could destroy all life in that city, the biological warfare which scientists tell us makes possible now the atomization of virus which any competent chemist can make in a bathtub, enough to destroy the population of the United States. I would like, if I may, to say this: Some 200 years ago, the philosopher Rousseau, whom you have doubtless read, pointed out that things are not civilization, that a savage with a bow and an arrow can do a lot of damage before he is stopped, but not nearly so much as a man with a gun or a cannon. Since then the progressive command of technology over material development and gadgets and bathtubs and electric lights and the 75921-48- -10 139 things with which the dictionary is bulging, have created a command over material development which was beyond what Rousseau contemplated but exactly in line with his thinking, and it is believed by many men wiser than I-it was believed even before the atomic bomb came, sir-that we were facing what James Truslow Adams called the greatest crisis in recorded history. Now with the atom bomb we have obviously reached what the Greeks used to call the perapatea, the turning point in a drama, which marked a radical departure from what had gone before. The growth of material civilization-there is a long speech which could be made about it, but there is no time for that. It seems to have resulted in a civilization, so-called, which is like one of those curious creatures that one sees in an insane asylum, with enormous physical power and intellectual acuity, and the moral and spiritual development of a backward and vicious child. Such is the culmination of the material civilization at the present time, and its final triumph is that it has acquired the power to destroy itself overnight and commit suicide. We have invented and made all possible things necessary to the welfare of the human race but we have not accompanied those inventions with the vision and the sense of unity and the generosity, the willingness to give up, which only can illuminate their use. There is, as Mr. Arnold Toynbee, the greatest of modern historians once told me, there is a sort of natural selection, a survival of the fittest by natural selection which occurs in political life, as well as the one which takes place in biology. Just as in biology, when a change of environment means that certain races or groups of people or even civilizations find themselves less adapted to survive in the new environment, than certain others, the former are selected for destruction, the latter for domination. Toynbee says that there have been some 21 civilizations in the world's history, of which 14 have disappeared completely, 5 are decadent-this is what he says in substance-and 2 more, ours being one of the 2—and as to them he raises a query. He has no definite assurance that ours is to be the last word and will survive. A natural selection operates, then, in politics due to changes in the economic or political environment; but man and the machine, with man's consequent ever-increasing domination over material matter and technology, have in themselves grown to constitute man's own environment. Perhaps it is the technologists, the scientists, who have created the world we know, and perhaps it is they whom we worship. If So, they have created a strange kind of creature. It is not their fault. God knows I do not blame them. They have only done their job; but material advance, unmatched by a corresponding advance in the realm of spiritual values, unmatched by generosity and vision and a sense or unity, is self-destructive. I need not say in this presence, that there is a grave urgency for Americans in the thought that the mantle of the world's leadership has fallen on the shoulders of this country. John Buchan, the Governor General of Canada, who died some 10 years ago, said that America, in his mind, was the greatest exponent of what he called the spiritual testament of democracy; that the American Constitution was the conscious work of men's hands; that what had been done once could be done again; that if there was to be any hope for peace it was necessary to find a way to-and he said "brigade the nations for peace." وو In that task, he said, America was the predestined leader. Let me repeat, conditions in the world are bad. The pressure is great and growing among the peoples of the earth, to find some way to prevent another war and to find it quickly. We have learned some things. We have been partly taught in a hard school, that things are not civilization. I have an impression that unless we learn the lesson pretty completely and pretty fast the price may be heavier still and perhaps beyond our ability to pay. But more and more, men are being driven in all the countries of the world to a willingness to give up a part of their nationalistic Sovereignty, to a vision of what peace and prosperity dimly seen beyond it might mean, and to a sense, that a house divided against itself cannot stand. We know perfectly well that treaties and promises between sovereign nations have never in recorded history prevented wars; have never in recorded history been kept when the pressure on a nation was great enough and its interests led it toward breaking those promises. We know, too, that the only way you can exert compulsion on a nation is to go to war against it. History, I think, teaches us that the only way to prevent wars between individuals, groups, tribes, and nations is to put one law over them. Civil war can then occur, of course, as it did with us, after the formation of what we called "a more perfect union"; but civil war today, revolt against a central government, is so much more difficult that it has become next to impossible. At the time of the Civil War, had you or I been alive, sir, we could have gone to our mantlepiece and taken off the trusty old musket, put some army clothes on and gone out, and we should have been soldiers. Today the central government is the only one which possesses tanks, airplanes, heavy guns, and heavy equipment, which possesses all the paraphernalia without which a modern war cannot possibly be fought. Revolt has become next to impossible. So that civil war, possible in 1861, is probably impossible now, except by corruption of a large part of a central government. It is nearly impossible, if every member state is disarmed, and if only the central government possesses heavy equipment and heavy arms. We know, if we know anything from history-please forgive me for saying this so emphatically in this presence, but all this is so significant, and I ask your indulgence that unfettered sovereignty for men or nations is not liberty but license and anarchy. Men, without one law over them— the English philosopher Hobbes said, a couple of hundred years ago— are like so many wolves, in a state of continuous war, man against man, and the life of man I like this phrase— low, mean, nasty, brutish, and short. So it is with nations, as we see today, as the pace and power of destruction accelerates. History does not teach us that peace is ever preserved by promises, when one sovereign nation, party to a pact, is sufficiently greedy or sufficiently afraid to be induced to break it. of The pressure of events-as Charles P. Taft said the pressure events when things are so bad is great and growing toward a federal government which will put one law over the nations; which will strengthen the United Nations to such a point that it becomes a nation of strictly limited powers, of course, but a nation of laws, and not merely any longer another League of Nations. May I review briefly what has happened in this world-wide movement for a United Nations world federal government. In the United States, Massachusetts had an official referendum last fall in which I am informed 75 percent of the eligible voters voted on an official proposition in 255 election districts, and 90.2 percent voted in favor of the resolution, for a conference of the nations looking toward a world federal government. The Gallup poll of September 15, 1947, indicated that 83 percent of the population of the United States was for a world conference to strengthen the United Nations; 85 percent were for a world federal government. The Committee of Atomic Scientists, as reported in the Washington Post of June 30, 1947, came out for it. Mr. Stimson mentioned it in his article in Foreign Affairs. Sixteen States-I am told it is 18 now, but I cannot vouch for that have advocated through their legislatures the calling of a conference in the form of the so-called Humber resolution, which is a resolution in favor of world federal government. In England, Mr. Churchill, on May 14, 1947, came out for a world federal government. So did Mr. Atlee in 1946. I have the documentary references for each of these if you wish them. Mr. Bevin did so on November 23, 1945. Mr. Eden did so-I have forgotten the date for that, but I have the reference. Arnold J. Toynbee also pointed out that it was necessary to have world federal government unless a series of devastating wars is to run its course until one government governs the earth by conquest. In France, Italy, and China, there are provisions in their new national constitutions permitting the executive to enter a world federal government if and when formed. I am told, although he has not personally told me so, that Count Sforza has committed himself to world federal government as well as Mr. Bevin. Mr. MacKenzie King and John Bracken, leaders of the Progressive Conservative Party, and Angus MacInnes, leader of the CCF Party, also. Obviously, again, in this presentation, I do not need to point out how persuasive is the parallel between the situation of the world today and the situation of the 13 little nation states in 1787 before the American Constitution was formed. Almost all of the hatreds and bitternesses which exist between the nations of the world today find close parallels in the hatreds and bit ternesses which existed between Connecticut when it was raising armies to fight Pennsylvania in 1781: New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, when they were laying tariff barriers against each other; between the great States and the small; between the States which laid claim to vast tracts of unexplored western land and those which did not have such claim. The parallel is not exact, of course, but to my mind and to that of historians much wiser than I am, the parallel is exceedingly persuasive. One thing is obvious, and that is that the incentive, the pressure of events, is stronger today by far than the pressure for unity was in those days, because then, what was to be lost and what at stake was liberty. Today what is at stake is not only liberty but life and-in Buck Rogers language, but in sober, scientific fact-the existence, perhaps, of civilization itself. The principles and the powers of a proposed United Nations world government United Nations Federal World Government, is, of course, the exact phrase to describe it, I think. At least, it pleases me, because I do not believe in anything which would scrap or destroy or diminish the United Nations itself. I believe in strengthening the United Nations by giving it additional and necessary powers. The principles on which such a government must be formed are as follows: 1. General world membership open to all nations. 2. All powers reserved to the individual nations, except those expressly conferred or necessarily inferred in the world government. 3. Enforcement of world law directly upon individuals; not on nations. 4. As I said before, the only way you can compel a nation, is to go to war against it. 5. Balanced representation, the representation being based not only on population but on industrial, educational, and possibly other factors to be determined by the constitutional convention which will ultimately set up this government. 6. A bill of rights: A bill of rights, if I may make it very clear, which will protect the individual citizen against the actions of the world government but which will not purport to interfere with any form of government now in existence on the face of the earth; not purport to intervene between any government and its own citizens. 7. Revenue: The United Nations Federal Government must have, of course, authority to raise an expendable revenue, and that means a strictly limited power of taxation, 8. Reasonable provisions for amendment. 9. Such a government must have in its charter provisions prohibiting the possession of armament or the manufacture of arms beyond an approved level for internal police purposes only, by any member nation. 10. Provisions requiring control and ownership by the world federal government of the dangerous aspects of atomic-energy development; much along the lines, I should think, sir, of the Baruch plan (the American plan); provisions requiring world inspection, a world United Nations federal government police, and such armed forces as may be necessary to enforce world law and provide world security. |