People who are seriously concerned with international relations—whether as scholars, officials, or interested citizens—generally purport to prefer that states should act in accordance with principle in their dealings with each other. This preference is usually stated wistfully, or even plaintively, as an ideal that is unfortunately far from any prospect of realization. The proposition is that states do not, but certainly should, consistently engage in principled behaviour in the international setting.

In 1962 I published Power and International Relations, a book in which I undertook to analyse, criticize, and compare balance of power, collective security, and world government, treating these as the three leading theoretical approaches to the management of power in the global arena. Each of these approaches had its band of adulators and advocates who doubtless found my efforts at critical appraisal offensive. For a young American scholar of that era the adoption of an irreverent attitude toward balance of power was particularly problematic, because that approach figured prominently in the prevailing orthodoxy of Political Realism. It would have been safer to assume, rather than to examine, the merits of balance of power. I gave balance of power, like its two competitors, a mixed review.

As a specialist in international politics, I have always believed that my primary business is to study states, those important political, legal and administrative units into which the world is divided. That preoccupation is not, of course, limited to my professional clan. All of political science, whether or not it is formally held to include international politics as a sub-discipline, focuses on the state, although it necessarily deals with other kinds of entity as well. Our academic brethren in such fields as history, economics and sociology also pay quite a lot of attention to the state. For that matter, no human being in today's world can escape the profound influence of the state, even though he may study nothing at all.

This essay is addressed to the issue of the extent to which and the ways in which the United Nations may serve the interest of the United States in the maintenance of world peace during the decade that lies ahead. It rests upon two assumptions, both of which require careful qualification: first, the assumption that the United States has, and recognizes that it has, a fundamental interest in international peace; second, the assumption that the United Nations is in principle an organization dedicated to the promotion of international peace.

As the United Nations has developed and as its role in world affairs has been adapted to the necessities and possibilities created and the limitations established by the changing realities of international politics, collective legitimization has emerged as one of its major political functions. By this I mean to suggest that the world organization has come to be regarded, and used, as a dispenser of politically significant approval and disapproval of the claims, policies, and actions of states, including, but going far beyond, their claims to status as independent members of the international system. In this essay I shall undertake to refine and elaborate this rough definition of collective legitimization and to discuss the performance of this role by the United Nations. It is essential in the beginning, however, to provide a foundation by offering some observations about the general problem of political legitimacy.

Undertaking to write about the future of the United Nations may well be regarded as a risky if not a downright foolhardy enterprise, particularly in 1965, between the tragicomedy of the nineteenth General Assembly and the great uncertainty of the twentieth session. For many people, the question is whether the United Nations has a future, and for some of them this question is purely rhetorical. I think that it has, or that, at any rate, general international organization has a future. Whatever may happen to the United Nations, I find it difficult to conceive that the men who conduct the foreign relations of states will ever again consider that they can dispense with a comprehensive institutional mechanism or that they will, in the foreseeable future, contrive a global mechanism fundamentally different in character from the United Nations. Objectively, the operation of the international system requires an organizational framework virtually coextensive with the system; just as education requires schools and universities and medicine requires hospitals and clinics, so international relations require at least as much organizational apparatus as the United Nations system provides. Moreover, there is evidence that this objective need has penetrated the consciousness of most statesmen. The questions that they have asked about international organization in the last twenty years have not included the question of whether it is sensible to equip the international system with a general institutional structure.