Year XXXVIII, Number 3, November 2025

Joseph Baratta 
Professor emeritus of World History and International Relations at Worcester State University, Massachusetts, USA.

United Nations reform, from a world federalist point of view, was the alternative when “scraping” the U.N. was seen as politically unwise in response to first use of atomic bombs. Grenville Clark, a prominent but rather unconventional colleague of Henry Stimson in the U.S. government, convened the Dublin conference in October 1945 in response to first use of atomic bombs at the end of World War II. The new United Nations, especially with its veto provisions in the Security Council, looked uncomfortably like the discredited League of Nations, which was a proven failure. Clark and his group sensed that what was needed was a General Assembly representative in some way of peoples, rather like the U.S. Congress after the American Revolution. They proposed this change in a ringing public declaration, which was sent to members of Congress and the press. The New York Times took the lead in opposition. While it recognized that the Dublin conferees were“able, sincere men and women,”it flatly declared they had done more harm than good.
They proposed to“scrap”the U.N.:

“A true federation, such as they contemplate, is beyond attainment at this stage of history. If the Dublin conferees doubt this assertion, let them read the day’s news, or put a question to London or Moscow, not to mention Washington. The actual choice is not between the UN and an ideal world government. It is between UNO and chaos”.
 
As a result, Clark did not abandon his conviction that a popularly representative, that is democratic, General Assembly would be key to an effective U.N., which he reaffirmed in A Plan for Peace (1950) and, with Louis B. Sohn, in World Peace through World Law (1958), but he did cease to propose abandoning the U.N. Charter and starting all over again.

That led to a broad split in the federalist movement between the U.N. reformers, who sought official action by the states members, and the advocates of a peoples world constitutional convention, who advocated a wholly new, revolutionary response to the advent of nuclear weapons. The latter group, led by British MP Henry Usborne, actually convened such a convention in Geneva (as fate would have it) in late 1950 after the start of the Korean War. That wing of the movement never recovered, though one still hears of it, especially by young people and those in utter despair.

So the U.N. reformers became the mainstream. A bit of what has actually been achieved is worth recalling to get a sense of what is possible in a seemingly inflexible system, though most of the successful reformers were not professed world federalists. They were good people, who refused to despair.

The Charter was written with provisions for reform. Art. 108 provides that amendments shall come into the force of law when adopted and ratified by  two-thirds of  the states 

members, including all of the permanent members of the Security Council. This has actually been done three times: to enlarge the Security Council from 11 to 15, with appropriate changes to its majority for decisions to 9 of 15 (1965); to enlarge Ecosoc to 54 (1965, 1971); and to reaffirm Art. 109(3) as if it had been acted upon (1955). Hence, it is untrue that the
U.N. Charter cannot be amended. It has been amended three times.

Art. 109(3), which provides for an automatic General Conference on the Charter in ten years after the founding conference at San Francisco in 1945, had been introduced by Harold Stassen of the American delegation to meet public demands for popular representation. Grenville Clark supported such an article if it called for a review conference every ten years. The final text left it at one. By 1955, the world was sunk in the Cold War and the provision was ignored because “the time was not appropriate.” Art. 109(3) has never been exercised to this day, though some still see potential for reform. For years there existed a “Special Committee on the Charter and on Strengthening the Role of the Organization,” which some world federalists in New York used to follow, but it was a dead duck.

In 1950 there occurred a change to the Charter introduced by the United States as a Great Power. When the Security Council was paralyzed by a Soviet walkout due to the Council’s refusal to seat Communist China, North Korea invaded the South. The U.S. saw the invasion as a test of its Containment policy and used its diplomacy to prevail on a majority of two-thirds of the states in the General Assembly to pass the Uniting for Peace Resolution. It provided for U.N. action (technically non-binding) in response to acts of aggression when the Security Council was unable to act (a situation not contemplated in the Charter).  Claiming a U.N. mandate,
 
President Truman appointed General MacArthur supreme commander of U.S. and allied forces, and the Korean War was fought to its present stalemate. But the Uniting for Peace Resolution, which has been used thirteen times, shows how creative interpretation rather than amendment has been key to growth of the Charter. Dag Hammarskjöld and Lester Pearson cited the resolution in creating U.N. peacekeeping at the time of the Sinai War of 1956. Similar processes have enabled the U.N. to acquire competence over the environment and human rights.

Space does not permit a full accounting of world federalists’ efforts, as a non-governmental organization, to reform the United Nations. I myself do so in my history, The Politics of World Federation (Praeger, 2004) and in a book of reviews of the most progressive scholarly literature on the U.N. after the end of the Cold War, The United Nations System (ABC Clio, 1995). [The publisher would not allow me to use the subtitle, Meeting the World Constitutional Crisis.] But I would like to comment on three major works by Maurice Bertrand from within the U.N. system; Joseph Schwartzberg, a professor of geography and long-term world federalist; and Augusto Lopez-Claros, a World Bank economist who has led the most recent and sophisticated reform effort at the Summit for the Future in September 2024.

Maurice Bertrand (of France) was a chief of the Joint Inspection Unit who responded to the long, slow decline of the United Nations as the United States showed signs of withdrawal from the “dangerous place,” as Daniel Patrick Moynihan called the U.N. The comfortable majorities of Western and Latin states members that the U.S. enjoyed in the early days had become displaced by the many small African and Asian countries after decolonization. Senator Nancy Kassebaum threatened to withdraw U.S. funding unless weighted voting 

on budgetary questions were introduced in the General Assembly. But that would upset the one-nation-one vote rule – the whole system of sovereign state organization – of the United Nations. Bertrand then issued his very critical report, which got him into such trouble that he soon had to leave the U.N. – Some Reflections on Reform of the United Nations (A/40/988, 1985). It is refreshing to read by all friends of the present stage of international organization.

Bertrand proposed an Economic United Nations in place of the security organization, which had long proved to be unworkable. He did not propose to reform the General Assembly along the lines of a democratic body representative of people (one-person-one- vote). He was quite plain about what was currently possible:

“One of the aspects [of U.N. reform] which certainly would have deserved lengthier treatment was that of opening up the World Organization to the “peoples of the United Nations.” [But] in the interests of effectiveness and realism, I felt that the World Organization over the next few decades should remain an intergovernmental organization. I felt that the time had not yet come to think in terms of a “World Parliament,” but on the contrary that it was appropriate first and foremost to try to perfect the system of multilateral negotiations among sovereign Governments”.

Joseph Schwartzberg was typical of late world federalists, who took up the whole U.N. system and illuminated it with his comprehension and sympathy. As a primer for students, his book, Transforming the United Nations System: Designs for a Workable World (UN University Press, 2013), is a must-read. But it treats the problems of a world without government as amenable to reasoning, and it is disconnected from recent history. It awaits a powerful popular movement demanding revolution.
 
The heart of the book is a section on replacing the Security Council veto by a clever system of weighted voting, as if the United States and other great powers would be persuaded to surrender the veto, if they only knew there is an alternative.

Augusto Lopez-Claros (not a professed world federalist) is the latest to emerge with a comprehensive analysis of the global situation for U.N. reform. His book, Global Governance and the Emergence of Global Institutions for the 21st Century, written with environmentalist Arthur E. Dahl and international lawyer Maja Groff (Cambridge University Press, 2020), is a master work. He had the support of many civic organizations, including the Stimson Center in Washington – briefly led by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright –, which carefully prepared for the U.N.’s Summit for the Future in September 2024. Lopez-Claros was careful not to propose something so currently impractical as abolition of the veto and he never uses the term,“world government.” His group had money ($600,000 from the Global Challenges Foundation) and yet his proposals, including a U.N. Parliamentary Assembly, failed to attract the interest of the small states at the summit. The small states were so fearful of losing commitments from the highly developed states to the Sustainable Development Goals that they would not dare support reforms that in principle would give them more power. It all concluded with diplomatic platitudes. The New York Times treated it as not a newsworthy event. Nevertheless, on the 80th anniversary of the founding of the U.N., a follow-up group has formed calling for exercise of Art. 109(3).

The world situation is rather like that of the European Union, which has also ground to a halt due to historic resistance. L’UE è un progetto incompiuto, as Lucio Levi says. “The E.U. is an unaccomplished project.” People cannot yet imagine themselves governed by foreigners.

They hang onto national sovereignty because it is familiar to them. They groan under the weight of these books on U.N. reform, which they don’t read. If they really believed in human rights, they would not need a world government. Somehow, we must find a new approach to U.N. reform. One way would be to think the unthinkable. Nuclear deterrence cannot be a long term solution. We must plan for the crisis caused by some great abuse of sovereign state power that will arouse a critical mass of the public and even concerned statesmen and women to demand democratic reforms of the United Nations. No country is “exceptional.” We will only find freedom under law.  Hegemons have proved irresponsible.
 
The age of nations is giving way to global community. A bid for world empire by one great power would be an historic mistake. The people shall judge. In union there is strength. Checks and balances are one proven device to keep popular assemblies fair. Whether a world president can be kept honorable is still a challenge. A World Republic will be the culmination of the democratic revolutions of the Age of Enlightenment.

The world historian Arnold Toynbee had a warning for that transition. “Man must learn by suffering,” as Aeschylus said. Or as the Epistle to the Hebrews put it,“Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth.”