1 - Eureka Street

At San Francisco, Evatt was acutely conscious ofthe balance to be struck between establishing aneffective world body, necessitating the backing andparticipation of the great powers, and at the same timekeeping within bounds the extent of the influencewhich those powers would wield through the organisation. This remains a pressing issue in 1995. A featureof the period of Security Council activism sincethe end of the Cold War has been the concern of manycountries about domination of UN decision-makingby the fiv e permanent members of the Council, andmore specifically by the three Western members, theso-called P3. One result of these concerns is that, forthe first time since 1945, there is now a real possibilitythat new Permanent Members will be added tothe Council. Australia has strongly supported such achange. Our reasoning is drawn from the same pragmatic national self-interest that inspired Evatt; we donot aspire to permanent m embership ourselves butwe have a strong stake in an effective Security Council.To retain legitimacy and a guarantee of internationalsupport in responding to the range of new anddifficult situations which now confront the internationalcommunity, the Council must represent thebroad range of interests and perspectives of UN m em ­ber states, and it must reflect the rea lities of power atthe turn of this century, not those prevailaing fifty years ago.NE OF THE C RUCIAL ELEMENTS in any expansion ofthe Security Council's permanent membership is theveto power. The fact is that those who have it cannotbe forced to give it up- indicating how far-s ightedEvatt was in trying to remove the great powers' abilityto veto Charter amendment. But if the veto wereextended to all serious aspirants for permanent m em ­bership, we would have an unworkable Coun cil, withup to ten countries able to block UN decision-making.One alternative approach would be to revive Evatt'sown proposal that the veto be excluded in its applicationfrom all aspects of peaceful settlement procedures,or even confined solely to Council action takenunder C hapter VII (that is, the enforcement provisionsof the C harter) but no doubt that is an even morequixotic aspiration.I expect it will take considerable further n egotiationbefore the question of Security Council structureis resolved. The point here is, as Evatt would haveappreciated, that som e compromise will have to bestruck if there arc to be new permanent m embers at atime w hen the overall UN m embership will not supportan unqualified extension of the veto power.But th e point is also that both the overallmembership (the majority of whom, like Australia,want an effective, representative Council), and theexisting permanent members (who will otherwise facethe risk of erosion of the authority of a key body inwhich their influence is wielded), have reasons to findsuch a compromise.It was not only the global but regional securityenvironment that occupied Evatt's attention at SanFrancisco. He had no illusions that the UN could offerany absolute guarantee of protection against armedthreat to Australia, and recognised that if collectivesecurity was found wanting, Australia would need to'fall back on regional arrangements and ultimatelyupon those of its own defence forces and those of itsallies'. His starting point was to seek to keep the U .K.and the United States engaged in maintaining securityand order in the South West Pacific.Evatt's insistence on including specific langu ageon co-operation on economic and social issues in theCharter was m otivated by the Labor Government'sgoal of maintaining full employment after WWII.Under the terms of the UN Charter as it eventuallyem erged, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)shares with the General Assembly responsibility forthe UN's promotion of international economic andsocial co-operation. Largely due to his persistence, UNmember states pledged to take 'joint and separate actionin co-operation with the [UN] orga nisa tion' forthe achievement of goals specified in Article 55 ofthe Charter, including 'higher standards of living, fullemploym ent and conditions of economic and socialprogress and development'. Indeed this undertaking,in Article 56, became known at San Fra ncisco as 'theAustralian pledge'.Some Americans, including Nelson Rockefeller,then a State Department adviser, suggested at the timethat Evatt wanted language in the C harter whichwould allow the Government in Canberra to use theexternal affa irs power to legislate on matters outsidethe federal powers listed in the Austnllian Constitution-an interesting forerunner to some of the claimswe hear to this day from sceptics and cynics on theOpposition benches ' But it is far more likely that Evattwas sticking to a brief which reflected the co mmonpolicy assumption in Australia at the time, which wasthat full employment in Australia would largely dependon the major economics' w illingness to pursuethat obj ective.One of the few positive effects of the paralysis ofthe UN Security Council during the Cold War wasthat the social an d economic goals set out in Article55 beca me for the most part central concerns of theUN. Ironically, one of the exceptions was full employment,as multilateral co-operation on employment policies and related financial and trade policywere discussed in the International Labo ur Organisation,the international financial institutions and theOECD rather than the UN itself. In contrast, the UN'srole in such Article 55 areas as technical developmentassistance, poverty alleviation, children's welfare,refugee problem s, international health and humanrights has been very substantial- and the memberstates' pledge in Article 56 has taken a very concreteform through support for multilateral aiel funds andprograms and through bilateral assistance.32EUREKA STREET • O CTOBER 1995