Suchergebnisse

The Charter of San Francisco is the modest end-product of the mightiest collective literary effort in history. Fifty delegations, comprising literally thousands of principal and subordinate personnel, labored feverishly for two months to achieve agreement on a constitution for the new world security organization.1 In contrast, the Covenant of the League of Nations was drafted by one of the commissions of the Peace Conference of Paris, on which there sat two representatives of each of the five major powers and one representative from each of nine of the secondary powers. This group of nineteen men met fifteen times.2The very broad participation of the smaller powers in the San Francisco Conference is obviously not to be explained in terms of their growing influence in world politics. Although the number of prospective permanent seat-holders in die Council of the proposed world organization was the same at Paris and at San Francisco, there had been in the intervening quarter-century a reduction rather than an increase in the number of powers of greatest influence.

The Security Council of the United Nations will, from the first day of its existence, include in its membership all of the great powers. The Council, backed by the united will of the five powers with permanent seats in that body, will act, if it acts at all, with an authority which no organ of the League of Nations ever possessed. In the League Council, there was no time during which all of the great powers participated. Only two of them, France and the United Kingdom, were League members throughout its period of activity. Some may believe that too high a price, or a higher price than was necessary, was paid to insure the participation of the Five Powers, and especially the United States and the Soviet Union, in the United Nations Organization. The price was paid largely in provisions of its Charter relative to the maintenance or restoration of international peace and security which circumscribe carefully the situations in which the Security Council can take action.

Nineteenth century states exhibited an impressive uniformity in their internal organization. There was widespread agreement as to the "proper" scope of state activity. This clear separation of the spheres of "sovereign" (governmental) and "non-sovereign" (private) activity shaped the development of certain doctrines of international law. The complete jurisdictional immunity granted to foreign sovereigns implicitly, though not explicitly, assumed such a clear-cut distinction. There was little objection to the rule as long as the sovereign rarely "descended into the market-place. " The original assumption is no longer realistic. Must the courts of foreign states still recognize sovereign immunity in litigation in which the state appears in the sphere formerly reserved to private enterprise?