New Members Day

Years of frustrated desires and months of delicate negotiations were concealed in a few paragraphs of turgid prose that lay before the eleven diplomats of the U.N. Security Council one day last week. Its title was Draft Resolution Doc. S-3502. Its fate rested with one man who sat, sad and misleadingly tranquil, behind the name plate of China.

Would Nationalist China defy the wishes of the majority of the U.N. General Assembly and use its Great Power veto to keep Outer Mongolia out of the U.N.--and with it 17 other countries?* Or had the threats of its many enemies and the pleas of its few friends persuaded Nationalist China to soften its opposition to a bargain the rest of the world had tentatively struck with the Communists? Blinking like a mournful owl from behind his glasses. Nationalist Delegate T. F. Tsiang slowly delivered the Nationalists' answer. "The peoples all over the world expect the United Nations to stand by its principles," he said. "When you base a proposition on a deal ... an illegal and immoral deal . . . you are destroying that very moral prestige of the [United Nations]." Tsiang paused. "This is a difficult moment for me," he said, then in German repeated Martin Luther's defiant apology to the Reichstag in Worms in 1521: "I cannot do otherwise."

The Universal Theory. The sticking point, so far as the Chinese Nationalists were concerned, was the Russian insistence on Outer Mongolia, a Soviet puppet state carved out of the northern part of old China, and with few, if any, outward appearances of nationhood.

The Nationalists had been unmoved by the reminder that they themselves, back in the early post-Yalta days of 1946, were among the first and one of the few to recognize Outer Mongolian sovereignty. They had been equally unmoved by the surprisingly candid statement of Australia's Sir Percy Spender: "It is not principle with which we are concerned here but expedience--the expediency of inexorable political circumstances." They also had been unmoved by two personal appeals from President Eisenhower to Chiang Kaishek, urging support for the notion of "universality" of U.N. membership.* But to the Nationalists, the logic of "universality" had nothing to do with fractions of Russia. And furthermore it might lead to the seating of Communist China.

In the next 20 minutes, the longest fusillade of vetoes in the U.N.'s veto-pocked history rent the Security Council. Tsiang, as promised, used China's veto for the first time. He vetoed Outer Mongolia. Russia's Arkady Sobolev, as he had warned, sprayed 15 vetoes at non-Communist candidates (including two, South Korea and South Viet Nam, proposed only by Tsiang).

New Maneuver. The U.N. exploded with rancor and accusation. "Today we could have had 17 nations admitted to the U.N.," cried Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of the U.S. "But the Soviet Union insisted on all or nothing." Russia's Arkady Sobolev accused the U.S. "The representative of the Kuomintang" did the U.S.'s "dirty work," he said. But the bulk of the recriminations fell, ironically, not on the nation that had just exercised the veto 15 times, but on the Nationalists' one veto. From the capitals of nations barred by Russia came resentful attacks on Formosa. Neutralists of the Afro-Asian bloc, led by India's mischief-making V. K. Krishna Menon, and some Latin Americans, talked out loud of unseating the Nationalists.

But the game was not yet over. Having shrewdly exposed the Chinese Nationalists to severe resentment, the Russians pulled a dramatic new maneuver. The Soviet delegation asked for an emergency meeting of the Security Council, and there proposed the blanket admission of 16 of the 18 countries, leaving Japan and Outer Mongolia until later.

Cabot Lodge was plainly caught by surprise. So were the other Western delegates, though with the kind of hindsight a good diplomat is supposed to have beforehand, it might have been foreseen that the Russians also were under pressure: they could not go back to their satellites--Albania. Bulgaria. Hungary and Rumania--and admit that Russia could not gel them into the United Nations. The Council adopted the new Soviet plan with little ado.

Broken Jade. That night the General Assembly sat overtime and, to resounding cheers and florid oratory, ratified the Security Council's action. There were two final U.S.-inspired flurries in the Council to bring in Japan, but Russia disposed of these with two more vetoes (making Moscow's score 77 out of the 80 vetoes cast in the U.N.'s ten-year history). Thus in one dramatic turnabout, the U.N. swelled from 60 to 76 nations, and the balance within the world organization sharply altered. For the first time, all Europe was represented, save Switzerland and divided Germany. The Soviet bloc increased from five to nine members. Latin America, whose 20 votes have long swung inordinate weight, found some of its relative strength diminished, though the Latin Americans were all for the "package deal" in order to get in their ancestral countries, Spain, Portugal and Italy.

The British gained a new member for the Commonwealth (Ceylon), but also had to accept the fact that the partition of Ireland will wave like a shillelagh in Assembly sessions to come. The Bandung bloc, dominated by the neutralist sentiment of India, Burma and Indonesia, was six members larger.

The final outcome diminished somewhat the resentment that had welled up against the Chinese Nationalists. But the relief might be temporary. By maneuvering the Nationalists into a use of the all-powerful veto at a time when an increasing number of U.N. countries question both Formosa's right to have it and its very existence as a government, the Russians had loosened the supports that hold the Formosa government afloat as the U.N. representative of China. In the dustup over Outer Mongolia, the Formosan government had been weakly abandoned even by its most influential friend, the U.S.

Knowing all this, Chiang Kai-shek nonetheless was content with his stand. "I only did my duty as called for by righteousness." he told U.S. reporters at Taipei. The Formosans see themselves as having in the past year made many humiliating retreats under pressure (Tachens, Nanchi) because their powerful U.S. ally had the final say in military matters. But in the U.N., on the subject of Outer Mongolia, was a chance to make a stand, even in principled defiance of the U.S.. and that defiance was a source of satisfaction. In Hong Kong an old Chinese proverb was quoted: "Better to be a broken piece of jade than a whole tile."

* Thirteen non-Communist nations: Austria, Cambodia, Ceylon, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Libya, Nepal, Portugal, Spain. Five Communist states: Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania and Outer Mongolia. * Urged by John Foster Dulles in 1950, while Republican adviser to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, on the ground that "the U.N. will best serve the cause of peace if its Assembly is representative of what the world actually is, and not merely representative of the parts that we like."

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