The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939-1951 by R. M. Douglas

Author:R. M. Douglas [Douglas, R. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Parties, Political Science, Political Process
ISBN: 9780714655239
Google: GKpy8XMVrBoC
Goodreads: 5806607
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-01-15T10:33:43+00:00

THE VETO: FATAL FLAW OR NECESSARY RESTRAINT?

Although Bevin had made clear his reservations about the UN even before it faced its first meeting, far less its first test, events at the first meeting of the Security Council in January and February 1946 appeared to bear out his doubts about the world organisation. On 19 January, the Iranian government accused the USSR, whose forces were occupying the northern provinces of the country under the terms of a wartime Anglo-Soviet agreement, of interfering in its internal affairs. In retaliation, the head of the Soviet delegation, Andrei Vyshinsky, charged Britain two days later with endangering the peace by maintaining troops in Greece and Indonesia, apparently in the hope of inducing Bevin to agree that neither complaint should be proceeded with. The Labour government, however, decided to accept the challenge and proposed a four-power commission to investigate the allegations against it. Their bluff called, the Soviets rejected this offer, and the episode concluded with the Security Council, over Britain’s objections, noting the views expressed by both sides and declining to take further action.

The Soviet conduct in this dispute – first levelling accusations at a fellow-member of the SC to divert attention from their own misdemeanours and then threatening the use of their veto to prevent the Council from finding that the charges were unsubstantiated44 – seriously disconcerted those within the Labour movement who had hoped that the UN, the defects of the Charter notwithstanding, might still become the cement of Big Three unity. Commenting upon its probable future trajectory, the New Statesman predicted that the organisation would either become ‘a new form of the anti-Communist Axis’ if the USSR withdrew from it, or would be rendered ‘farcical’ through repeated use of the veto if the USSR remained.45 In that eventuality it would be better if the organisation were wound up, since its ‘transformation into a bloc to which the U.S.S.R. is hostile and which is hostile to the U.S.S.R. would be inevitable’. Britain could not afford to participate in such a bloc, because the likely outcome would be atomic war.46 To some within the party, on the other hand, the same argument became even more forceful when turned upside down. Precisely because the catastrophic consequences of another war were so great, Britain had nothing to lose by using the UN not, as Bevin and Vyshinsky had done, as a more inclusive version of the Council of Foreign Ministers, but as a genuine agency of world government. On 11 February, Zilliacus argued the point in a lengthy memorandum, a copy of which he sent to Attlee. Socialist reconstruction at home and the cause of peace abroad, he suggested, were being endangered by the continuation of a Tory foreign policy necessitating the maintenance of vast overseas forces that the country could no longer afford. The recent Soviet action in the SC over Indonesia, while reprehensible on its face, begged the question of why the Labour government had not itself first referred the problem to the Council.

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