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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
The Security Council of the United Nations will, from the first day of its existence, include in its membership all of the great powers. The Council, backed by the united will of the five powers with permanent seats in that body, will act, if it acts at all, with an authority which no organ of the League of Nations ever possessed. In the League Council, there was no time during which all of the great powers participated. Only two of them, France and the United Kingdom, were League members throughout its period of activity. Some may believe that too high a price, or a higher price than was necessary, was paid to insure the participation of the Five Powers, and especially the United States and the Soviet Union, in the United Nations Organization. The price was paid largely in provisions of its Charter relative to the maintenance or restoration of international peace and security which circumscribe carefully the situations in which the Security Council can take action.
1 By Art. 110 of the Charter of the United Nations, that instrument will not come into force until it has been ratified by each of the Big Five and by a majority of the other signatory powers.
2 This development is in a sense a vindication of the French position during most of the inter-war period, that the League system must be strengthened or supplemented by a system of precise commitments. It was appropriate that at San Francisco the rapporteur of the Committee on Enforcement Arrangements was France's veteran advocate of collective security and long-time representative at Geneva, M. Joseph Paul-Boncour.
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