U.N.: Threat & Promise

If tomorrow’s historians even noted it, they might describe what happened on June 1, 1946 in these words: “A patch work compromise stitched lightly together by the U.N. subcommittee on Spain showed the inherent futility of world cooperation.” Or the books might say: “For the first time, a U.N. body reached agreement on a major political issue dividing the great powers ; the report on Spain was weak, but it established the precedent for stronger ones to follow.” The subcommittee (Australia, Poland, France, China and Brazil) went along with the U.S.-British view that Franco was not a “threat to peace” in the sense that he planned attack. They went along, too, with the Russian view that Franco had been an Axis plotter and that the very existence of such a government constituted a “potential” menace.

So the subcommittee unanimously recommended that, if Franco is still in power next September, the U.N. General Assembly should then vote to ask all its 51 nations to break diplomatic relations with him. When the formula came before the full Council, Britain and the U.S. might ask for delay in applying the quarantine, but in the end, the Council was likely to accept the subcommittee’s plan. Worldwide diplomatic isolation of Spain by U.N. action might be enough to unhorse Franco.

By inventing the tenuous notion of a threat-of-a-threat, the subcommittee had achieved at least a promise-of-a-promise of world order.