In
the first idea and form of a beginning of world-union which took the
shape of the League of Nations, although there were errors in the structure
such as the insistence on unanimity which tended to sterilise, to limit
or to obstruct the practical action and effectuality of the League,
the main defect was inherent in its conception and in its general build,
and that again arose naturally and as a direct consequence from the
condition of the world at that time. The League of Nations was in fact
an oligarchy of big Powers each drawing behind it a retinue of small
States and using the general body so far as possible for the furtherance
of its own policy much more than for the general interest and the good
of the world at large. This character came out most in the political
sphere, and the manoeuvres and discords, accommodations and compromises
inevitable in this condition of things did not help to make the action
of the League beneficial or effective as it purposed or set out to be.
The absence of America and the position of Russia had helped to make
the final ill-success of this first venture a natural consequence, if
not indeed unavoidable. In the constitution of the U.N.O. an attempt
was made, in principle at least, to escape from these errors; but the
attempt was not thoroughgoing and not altogether successful. A strong
surviving element of oligarchy remained in the preponderant place assigned
to the five great Powers in the Security Council and was clinched by
the device of the veto; these were concessions to a sense of realism
and the necessity of recognising the actual condition of things and
the results of the second great war and could not perhaps have been
avoided, but they have done more to create trouble, hamper the action
and diminish the success of the new institution than anything else in
its make-up or the way of action forced upon it by the world situation
or the difficulties of a combined working inherent in its very structure.
A too hasty or radical endeavour to get rid of these defects might lead
to a crash of the whole edifice; to leave them unmodified prolongs a
malaise, an absence of harmony and smooth working and a consequent discredit
and a sense of limited and abortive action, cause of the wide-spread
feeling of futility and regard of doubt the world at large has begun
to cast on this great and necessary institution which was founded with
such high hopes and without which world conditions would be infinitely
worse and more dangerous, even perhaps irremediable. A third attempt,
the substitution of a differently constituted body, could only come
if this institution collapsed as the result of a new catastrophe: if
certain dubious portents fulfil their menace, it might emerge into being
and might even this time be more successful because of an increased
and a more general determination not to allow such a calamity to occur
again; but it would be after a third cataclysmal struggle which might
shake to its foundations the international structure now holding together
after two upheavals with so much difficulty and unease. Yet, even in
such a contingency, the intention in the working of Nature is likely
to overcome the obstacles she has herself raised up and they may be
got rid of once and for all. But for that it will be necessary to build,
eventually at least, a true World-State without exclusions and on a
principle of equality into which considerations of size and strength
will not enter. These may be left to exercise whatever influence is
natural to them in a well-ordered harmony of the world's peoples safeguarded
by the law of a new international order. A sure justice, a fundamental
equality and combination of rights and interests must be the law of
this World-State and the basis of its entire edifice.
The
real danger at the present second stage of the progress towards unity
lies not in any faults, however serious, in the building of the United
Nations Assembly but in the division of the peoples into two camps which
tend to be natural opponents and might at any moment become declared
enemies irreconcilable and even their common existence incompatible.
This is because the so-called Communism of Bolshevist Russia came to
birth as the result, not of a rapid evolution, but of an unprecedentedly
fierce and prolonged revolution sanguinary in the extreme and created
an autocratic and intolerant State system founded upon a war of classes
in which all others except the proletariat were crushed out of existence,
"liquidated", upon a “dictatorship of the proletariat”
or rather of a narrow but all-powerful party system acting in its name,
a Police State, and a mortal struggle with the outside world: the fierceness
of this struggle generated in the minds of the organisers of the new
State a fixed idea of the necessity not only of survival but of continued
struggle and the spread of its domination until the new order had destroyed
the old or evicted it, if not from the whole earth, yet from the greater
part of it and the imposition of a new political and social gospel or
its general acceptance by the world's peoples. But this condition of
things might change, lose its acrimony and full consequence, as it has
done to some degree, with the arrival of security and the cessation
of the first ferocity, bitterness and exasperation of the conflict;
the most intolerant and oppressive elements of the new order might have
been moderated and the sense of incompatibility or inability to live
together or side by side would then have disappeared and a more secure
modus vivendi been made possible. If much of the unease, the sense of
inevitable struggle, the difficulty of mutual toleration and economic
accommodation still exists, it is rather because the idea of using the
ideological struggle as a means for world domination is there and keeps
the nations in a position of mutual apprehension and preparation for
armed defence and attack than because the coexistence of the two ideologies
is impossible. If this element is eliminated, a world in which these
two ideologies could live together, arrive at an economic interchange,
draw closer together, need not be at all out of the question; for the
world is moving towards a greater development of the principle of State
control over the life of the community, and a congeries of socialistic
States on the one hand, and on the other, of States coordinating and
controlling a modified Capitalism might well come to exist side by side
and develop friendly
relations with each other. Even a World-State in which both could keep
their own institutions and sit in a common assembly might come into
being and a single world-union on this foundation would not be impossible.
This development is indeed the final outcome which the foundation of
the U.N.O. presupposes; for the present organisation cannot be itself
final, it is only an imperfect beginning useful and necessary as a primary
nucleus of that larger institution in which all the peoples of the earth
can meet each other in a single international unity: the creation of
a World-State is, in a movement of this kind, the one logical and inevitable
ultimate outcome.
-Sri
Aurobindo
