The Third World UN, 1960–

80
Dr Naila Erum
THE THIRD WORLD AND THE UN
• The decline in US dominance of the UN began in 1955 when America lost its ‘automatic’
two-thirds majority in the General Assembly.
• For in that year, after much superpower backbiting, sixteen new members were
admitted.
• Within a few years decolonisation had transformed the UN into a third world
dominated organisation: out of 114 members in 1964, fifty-seven were Afro-Asians.
• In consequence, the UN of the mid-1960s would have been ‘hardly recognisable’ to
those who were at San Francisco.
• Committees, commissions and working groups proliferated on issues that directly
concerned the third world. The UN’s agenda widened.
• Soon there were almost yearly conferences on development or development-related
issues – for example, the 1974 Rome food conference, which produced an ambitious,
long-term plan and led to the establishment of the World Food Council.
• The thrust of the third world UN was in the direction of economic activities.
• By the early 1980s, up to six times more was spent in this field than on international
peace and security.
• The Soviets go out with the third world, but third world states voted with the Soviets only
when their views coincided, and in the early 1960s the US won twice as much support as
the Soviets on cold war issues.
• However, as the growth of non-alignment indicates, most new members did not see the
cold war as ‘their’ concern. They had their own agenda and it did not coincide with that of
the Soviets or the West.
• They wanted to change the largely Eurocentric vision prevailing in the UN, to expand the
UN’s institutions in the direction of development, and to make the organization more
‘democratic’.
• The UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the Security Council became more
representative: membership of the former grew from 18 to 27 in 1965, and from 27 to 54
in 1973.
• The Council expanded from 11 to 15 in 1965.
• But this did nothing to remove the international evils as perceived by new states. They had
all the righteousness of the weak and only one trump card, their ability to speak out –
loudly if necessary – and to pass General Assembly resolutions by overwhelming
majorities.
• An increasingly persuasive Assembly became a third world campaigning body in which
voting victories substituted for fundamental changes.
ANTICOLONIALISM
• Two of the ‘big three’ founder-members – the USA and USSR – were officially anti-
imperial, and the UN’s ranks were rapidly swollen by newly liberated states for whom
decolonization was a burning issue to be followed whenever the opportunity arose.
• There was no dispute about the right of the General Assembly, acting through the
Trusteeship Council, to exert influence in trust territories, whose administering
powers were bound by individual trusteeship agreements.
• The Trusteeship Council collected annual reports from administering states, received
petitions and despatched three-yearly missions to each territory. Its membership was
equally divided between administering and non-administering powers.
• This reduced it insufficiently aggressive or critical for the anti-colonials.
• Whenever possible, therefore, they used the General Assembly and bypassed the
Trusteeship Council.
• The Assembly heard oral petitioners who had been refused a hearing by the Council,
sent its own visiting missions to trust territories, made recommendations (not always
in accord with those of the Council) directly to administering authorities, and tried to
get the Trusteeship Council to take certain sorts of action. And so the Trusteeship
Council declined in business and prestige.
• Separately from its provisions about Trusteeship, the Charter had a section
(Chapter XI) called the Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories
(thatis, regarding straightforward colonies).
• Initially, the colonial powers disputed the General Assembly’s right to discuss any
information they transmitted to the UN under this Chapter.
• However, in 1946 the anti-colonials succeeded in creating a temporary Special
Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories.
• In 1960 the admission of 17 former colonies gave a big boost to anti-colonialism,
and the Soviet Union seized the opportunity to curry friends and make trouble: it
proposed a declaration demanding freedom for all colonies within a year.
• The 43 Afro-Asians took up the idea, modified it, and in December 1960 a draft
resolution (the Declaration on Granting Independence to Colonial Countries and
Peoples) was overwhelmingly passed as Resolution 1514.
• It demanded immediate independence and announced the ‘subjection of
peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation’ to be ‘a denial of
fundamental human rights . . . contrary to the Charter of the UN, and . . . an
impediment to . . . world peace and co-operation’
• In 1961, the effort to cancel the legitimacy of colonialism was pushed to an extreme when India
‘liberated’ Goa from Portuguese rule and the three Afro-Asians on the Security Council supported
India, ignoring Article 2.4, which bans the use or threat of force. Then, in 1965, Resolution 2105
comprehensively condemned colonial rule as a threat to international peace and security and a
crime against humanity.
• Meanwhile, in 1963 the Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories had been
wound up because irked colonial powers would have nothing to do with it. By then, the anti-
colonials were pursuing their imperialist quarry in other fora: the Assembly’s Fourth Committee
and the predominantly Afro-Asian ‘Committee of Twenty-Four’, which was established in 1961. The
latter committee collected information and received petitioners – providing they had the ‘right’
bias.
• It despatched visiting missions where the colonial power would accept them and, when visits were
denied, held meetings in the field, near to the territories. It also compiled its own list of colonial
areas to which independence should be granted.
• The Committee of Twenty-Four became increasingly extreme, partly because the severest
anticolonials – the 38 sub-Saharan African states – were frustrated over the ‘hard core’ colonial
areas remaining in Africa. By the end of the 1960s, however, there were few trust territories, and
such colonies as remained were mostly very small. But the campaign continued.
• It resulted in irritated Western powers leaving the Committee of Twenty-Four. When Portugal
recognised the independence of its former African colonies in 1974, the anticolonial spotlight
focused almost exclusively on Southern Africa. Here the target was not just colonialism (in the
shape of the white minority regime in Rhodesia, and South Africa’s continuing control of South West
RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
South Africa
• Racial discrimination had become an international issue in 1946 when the General Assembly criticised
South Africa’s treatment of people of Indian origin. Gradually the criticism broadened, and when South
Africa introduced complete racial segregation in 1952, the General Assembly launched its onslaught.
• In 1961, apartheid was condemned as a flagrant violation of the Charter. In 1962, the General Assembly
passed its first resolution calling for sanctions (only the Security Council can impose them), and
institutionalised the anti-racist campaign by creating the Special Committee against Apartheid (as it was
known from 1970). From 1966 onwards it was assisted by an anti-apartheid centre in the UN Secretariat.
• The 11 members of the Special Committee against Apartheid were all from the third world or eastern
bloc and they harried South Africa as vigorously as the Committee of Twenty-Four hounded
imperialists. South Africa was hounded out of the Food and Agriculture Organisation in 1963, and the
International Labour Organisation in 1964.
• In 1963 the Security Council called on states to restrict arms sales to South Africa, and in 1965 the
General Assembly passed the strongly-worded Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination, Resolution 1904. By 1973, 12 per cent of all Assembly resolutions attacked South Africa.
• In 1974, South Africa suffered the humiliation of having her delegates’ credentials rejected. In 1976 the
Assembly began advocating ‘armed struggle’. By the early 1980s, South Africa was being verbally
attacked in over half the plenary sessions and criticised in a fifth of Assembly resolutions. South Africa’s
trading partners were condemned for encouraging racist policies and the Security Council was
unsuccessfully called on to apply comprehensive mandatory sanctions
• Rhodesia
• Rhodesia came before the General Assembly in 1961, and was one of the first
territories tackled by the Committee of Twenty-Four.
• Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in November 1965 that put it
on the front burner.
• At Britain’s request, the Security Council immediately condemned the ‘illegal, racist
minority regime’, urged states to withhold recognition, called on Britain to end the
rebellion, and asked other states to break off economic relations and apply an oil
embargo.
• This fell short of what the Africans passionately desired and demanded: British
military force to defeat the rebels. But Britain made it clear she would veto military
sanctions, and the Security Council would go no further than was acceptable to
London. However, the Commonwealth persuaded Britain in December 1966 to
sponsor a Security Council resolution that led to the first ever application of
mandatory sanctions.
• Nine exports vital to the Rhodesian economy were banned on the grounds that the
illegal regime constituted ‘a threat to international peace and security’. Almost a
hundred states reported compliance with the resolution and Zambia, which was
dependent on Rhodesia for 95 per cent of her transport, was given urgent
• In 1968, at Britain’s request, the Security Council approved a total trade ban on Rhodesia.
Moreover, in 1971 the US Congress lifted the ban on importing ‘strategic and critical’
materials from Rhodesia.
• When Rhodesia declared itself a republic in 1970, it again came before the Security
Council. The Afro-Asians insisted on voting on a resolution they knew Britain would veto.
Having seen the Security Council’s sanctions committee paralysed for months because of
‘a silly little squabble about its membership’, Washington responded to ‘openly insincere
manoeuvrings’ by casting its very first veto. But in the mid-1970s the political balance in
Southern Africa changed with Angolan and Mozambican independence, and nationalist
guerrillas gained an increasing military advantage.
• South Africa in effect told Rhodesia’s leader Ian Smith to settle, and Smith reached an
internal agreement in 1978. The world refused to recognise it.
• Significantly, it was not the UN that weighed most heavily in Britain’s thinking but
Commonwealth pressure; the political and economic costs of not settling; the views of
Britain’s European partners and the USA; and the danger of the expansion of Russian
influence.
• Building on his predecessor’s negotiations, Lord Carrington chaired the Lancaster House
talks that led to Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe in May 1980. In this there was no role for
the UN: it was a Commonwealth force that monitored the pre-independence elections.