Senator BIDEN. And you're still getting it. Mr. FULBRIGHT. Ours has settled down pretty well. They finally recognized we do a better job than they do in Boston. I didn't really mean to inject Boston into this other than to illustrate that it is so easy for people to give advice in this area when it doesn't affect them. NATIONALISM AND THE U.N. CONCEPT Senator BIDEN. One last broad question or observation, I am not sure which it is. Senator Clark raised the question or pointed out what we all, I think, agree to. The motivating force in international politics over the last 300 or 400 years has been the continuing growth of nationalism. Now, this is particularly evidenced in third world nations. I think this is understandable in most cases. These countries may be expressing these feelings more than larger countries have in the past. How do you think that the U.N., as envisioned by most, comports with the continuing growth of nationalism? Is it consistent, do you think, for us to expect that there would be any significant voluntary yielding of that national sentiment on the part of these emerging third world nations even through the remainder of this century, in the year 2000. When we are there it is easy, much easier, it seems to me, for we and the Western European nations and Russia to yield up some of our sovereignty than it is for nations who are emerging and have not acquired it yet to yield. Mr. FULBRIGHT. Well, this is an area which is very difficult from a semantic point of view. The nationalism as such is not a bad thing. I mean people should have pride in their customs and their country. Senator BIDEN. I am not suggesting that it is, by the way. Mr. FULBRIGHT. But it isn't inconsistent in joining the U.N. and agreeing to abide by it. You are not negating it. You are exercising your power to voluntarily accept certain obligations. Every time a country makes a treaty of any kind, it is, in a sense, binding itself to a certain course of action which, if you want to be very precise about it, means it has given up its sovereignty. Countries make treaties all the time of one kind or another, treaties of amnity and friendship and trade, and they agree to give up this absolute freedom to do as they please under any circumstance. As I say, we get into very difficult, semantic problems. I don't see anything inconsistent with sovereignty of a nation that says there are certain areas which we cannot control anyway. What can these small countries do about developing the oceans or what can they do about preventing pollution or preventing oil spills off their coasts? What can little countries that do not border on the sea or Africa do about it. Their only hope to preserve, we will say, a very important part of their national assets is to utilize some international agency to prevent or to control the oil spills and so in. This is a rather complicated area to develop at the moment, although I do not see any difficulty or inconsistency between nationalism and agreeing and cooperating fully with the United Nations. Senator BIDEN. Thank you very much, Senator. OIL PROBLEMS AND INDEXATION OF COMMODITIES Senator PERCY. Senator Fulbright, could you tell us whether you think the oil supply problem could be negotiated under U.N. auspices? Do you think the U.N. should take a greater role and would you care to comment on the demand made by developing nations for indexation of commodities to provide to them automatic price increases in their commodity exports, as their imports increase in price? Mr. FULBRIGHT. In response to the last part of your question, I didn't realize how far they have gone already in assuming jurisdiction in this area. Senator PERCY. The charter that was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly for indexation is an extraordinarily complex subject. Mr. FULBRIGHT. If they are going into that, certainly it would be appropriate to try to discuss it there if possible. Of course, I am for trying to negotiate with the oil producers in any area we can if that is possible. If the settlement in the Middle East can be brought about, I still think there is a possibility of a more gradual price adjustment rather than this tremendous increase so as to give the developing countries particularly the opportunity to adjust to the new price levels. The levels of prices will never go back to what they were. I am not really competent to go much further than to say if they brought this subject up, and as you say it is now being discussed and is part of that charter, I don't know why they didn't think it appropriate to suggest to these people that fuel and energy are just as much a part of the overall concern as food or anything else. SENATOR FULBRIGHT'S CONTRIBUTION TO HEARING Senator PERCY. Thank you very much. We are grateful for your appearance today, and it has been very helpful. The CHAIRMAN. Senator Fulbright, we all join in extending our appreciation to you for this very capable handling of a difficult subject. Mr. FULBRIGHT. Thank you. This is my first return to the Hill, the first time I have been in a committee meeting, and it has made me very conscious of how long I was here and how much I miss being a member of this committee. When I see these new members I feel very sad that I am not going to have an opportunity to be with you more often. I appreciate very much your asking me. I am very flattered you thought I might add something to this. The CHAIRMAN. Let me ask you a quick personal question. How is the law practice coming? Mr. FULBRIGHT. I am in a very good firm, and if advice, we are open for business. [Laughter.] you PANEL INTRODUCTION AND COMMENDATION need any legal The CHAIRMAN. Now we have a panel, I will ask the panelists to come around, please. Dr. Gardner, Henry L. Moses, professor of law and international organization, Columbia University; Mr. Abraham Yeselson, chair 54-738-75- -6 man, Political Science Department, Rutgers University, author, "A Dangerous Place: The United Nations as a Weapon in International Politics:" Mr. Joseph Segel, former chairman, board of governors, United Nations Association, U.S. Alternate Representative to the 29th General Assembly; and Mr. C. Maxwell Stanley, president of the Stanley Foundation. Senator PERCY. I have not had the pleasure of knowing Dr. Yeselson and I am looking forward to hearing from him today, but I want the Chair to know that I have had the highest regard and close relationship with the other three witnesses. Dick Gardner is one of the most knowledgeable men we have on international organizations, and Joe Segel is a former chairman of the Board of Governors of the U.N. Association and a member of the U.S. delegation at the U.N., so he has seen it from the inside as well as the outside. Maxwell Stanley's seminars, which his foundation has sponsored around the world in an effort to foster world peace and strengthen international organizations have made an important contribution; he has devoted not just his financial resources but also his own personal time over a period of many years. The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Gardner, we have your statement, which is very long. STATEMENT OF RICHARD N. GARDNER, HENRY L. MOSES PROFESSOR OF LAW AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Dr. GARDNER. I have no intention of reading it. The CHAIRMAN. The statement will be printed in full in the record. We will be very glad if you will summarize and discuss it with us. [Mr. Gardner's biography follows:] BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON RICHARD N. GARDNER Richard N. Gardner, Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia University, served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Interna tional Organization Affairs from 1961 to 1965. He is currently the United States member and the rapporteur of the Group of High Level Experts which Secretary General Kurt Waldheim has appointed to propose structural changes in the United Nations system of economic cooperation. Born in New York City, June 9, 1927, Professor Gardner is a veteran of World War II. He graduated from Harvard College, where he majored in economics and received a B.A. degree magna cum laude in 1948. In 1951 he received an LL.B. from the Yale Law School, where he served as Note Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Professor Gardner was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Eco nomics in 1954 by Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1953-54, Professor Gardner served as Teaching Fellow in International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He practiced law in New York City with the firm of Coudert Brothers from 1954 to 1957. In 1957 he joined the faculty of Columbia University as Associate Professor of Law, and he became a full Professor in 1960. Professor Gardner left his post as Professor of Law at the Columbia Law School to join the Kennedy Administration in April, 1961. Professor Gardner received the Arthur S. Fleming Award for 1963 as one of the ten outstanding young men in the Federal Government. As Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs, he was concerned with the international organization aspects of numerous foreign policy problems, including disarmament, outer space, trade, and aid to less developed countries. He served as a member of the U.S. delegation to sessions of the U.N. General Assembly and also as a U.S. delegate to meetings of various U.N. Specialized Agencies including the International Labor Organization, the World Health Organization, and the Food and Agriculture Organization. He was Vice-Chairman of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964. After his return to Columbia University in 1965 he served as Senior Advisor to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Arthur J. Goldberg. From 1969-73 he was the U.S. member of the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and is currently a member of the U.S. Government's Advisory Committee on the Law of the Sea, in which capacity he is participating in the Law of the Sea Conference. In 1970-71 he served as a member of President Nixon's Commission on International Trade and Investment Policy. He is a Vice President of the American Society of International Law. He served as a consultant to Maurice Strong, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program. He participated as a member of the U.N. Secretariat at Stockholm in the drafting of the new U.N. machinery for environmental cooperation. He is also serving as the North-American director of a project on its "Energy Crisis and Relations with Developing Countries" for the Trilateral Commission, a group of leading citizens from Europe, Japan and North America. Professor Gardner is the author of four books: Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy; In Pursuit of World Order; Blueprint for Peace; and The Global Partnership: International Agencies and Economic Development. He is currently on a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship developing material for a book on "Strategies for the Development of International Organizations 1975–2000.” Dr. GARDNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a great honor to follow Senator Fulbright's elegant statement. His basic diagnosis of our problem and his remedies seem to me fully persuasive. Rather than draw upon my statement in details I suggest it might be of greater interest to the committee if I attempt to deal with some of the issues that have been raised this morning in this extraordinarily interesting discussion. The CHAIRMAN. Fine. MEMBERS SHOULD WORK HARDER TO MAKE U.N. MORE WORKABLE INSTITUTION Dr. GARDNER. This morning you have asked us to answer the question. Is the U.N. working? My answer to that is a qualified yes-the United Nations is working in the sense that it is providing indispensable services to its member nations, including the United States, in peacekeeping and economic cooperation. My qualification is that the United Nations is not working as well as it should, and that most of the explanation for this fact can be found in the behavior of its members. As a former British Ambassador to the U.N., Lord Caradon, once said "There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the U.N. except its members." So we should ask this morning not only whether the United Nations is working, but whether its members, including the United States, are working. I mean working as hard as they should to enable the world organization to perform the tasks assigned to it under the Charter. I was deeply interested in the emphasis Senator Fulbright placed on negotiated solutions rather than on voting in the United Nations. PROPOSED STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN U.N. SYSTEM REPORT At this moment, Mr. Chairman, I am serving as the American member and also as the rapporteur of a so-called group of high level experts appointed by Secretary-General Waldheim to propose struc tural changes in the United Nations system. We are in the final stages of writing our report. We hope to complete it next week. One of the central issues we are addressing is this very question of decisionmaking; and it would not be appropriate for me at this moment to state in a public forum what our conclusions will be, but I believe when the Senate of the United States has an opportunity to see the proposals we are making in this field, it will find they represent progress toward a more rational system of making decisions in the United Nations with emphasis on conciliation among the countries principally concerned, rather than on sterile debate in plenary forums of 138 countries. ECONOMIC ISSUES OBSERVATIONS Now, the question was raised by Senator Percy about the special session, the economic charter, and other economic issues. I would like to make an observation on that score. One of our principal problems in the United Nations is the increas ing isolation of the United States, and one reason for the increasing isolation of the United States from the majority of members of the world community is our failure to show a sufficient concern with the priorities of the developing nations. Senator Percy, in his report on the last General Assembly session, very eloquently emphasized the need to try to strike a bargain with these countries. I would urge that we do a job of preparation for this special session, not merely, Senator Percy, to try to work out the difficulties on that economic charter, and I agree we should try to work those out; but large rhetorical statements are not going to solve our problems in the world. What we have to do is go beyond this economic charter and look at specific issues where we are divided from the developing countries-issues like commodity trade, issues like development assistance, issues like reform of the international monetary system, issues like the control of transnational companies, and finally the issue of restructuring of international agencies, not just the U.N. itself, but the Bank and the Fund and the GATT-General Agreement on Tariff and Trade--to provide a fairer sharing in decisionmaking power between all groups of nations. If there were time, I would offer some specific ideas on all those subjects, but I am afraid that would take too much time and not be fair to my fellow panelists. If you are interested, I would like to suggest at a later stage specific things the United States could do in each of these fields to deal with this great economic agenda. In essence, my philosophy can be summed up in this sentence. We have to strike a new economic bargain with the developing countries in which access to supply, particularly to vital raw materials, energy, and other minerals which we want, is traded for access for the developing countries to markets at fair and remunerative prices for their products, and access to technology, to capital, and to a fairer share of decisionmaking in international economic forums, which up to now have been dominated by the developed countries. |