Walter R. Sharp

The Specialized Agencies and the United Nations: Progress Report I

The pattern of relations between the United Nations and the specialized agencies has now been developed to a point where some comparison of the theory of the Character with emerging practice may be useful. By midsummer 1947 the Economic and Social Council had held four sessions. Its structure of commissions and subcommissions had been substantially established and the first round or so of meetings completed. Formal agreements, as envisaged by Articles 57 and 63 of the Character, had been concluded with four specialized agencies — ILO, FAO, UNESCO, and ICAO — all of which were going concerns. Negotiations to this end were slowly progressing with the Bank and the Fund. A seventh agency (WHO), although still in the preparatory stage, had begun negotiations with a view to the eventual conclusion of an agreement, while the constituent instrument of the International Trade Organization, then in the final drafting phase at Geneva, was certain to call for the establishment of a formal connection between ITO and the United Nations. The IRO, though a United Nations creation and declared by its basic instrument to be a “specialized agency” within the meaning of Article 57, belongs in a different category because of its temporary character.

Decisionmaking in the Economic and Social Council

The United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) is not a diplomatic conference, or a parliament, or an executive organ, although it smacks of all three. Among international, governmental, deliberative bodies it is sui generis . As such, it engages in discussing quasi diplomatic issues, chiefly economic and social in nature, in recommending policy actions by governments, in trying to plan and coordinate interagency programs in the economic and social domain, and in innovating and supervising programs under UN sponsorship.

The United Nations System in Egypt: A Country Survey of Field Operations

Perhaps the most striking development in the non -political activities of the United Nations system during recent years has been the rapid expansion of its field operations. While this evolution received its chief impetus from the “Expanded” Technical Assistance Program (ETAP)inaugurated in 1950, there have also been significant shifts of emphasis toward “aids to member states” in the “regular” programs of those specialized agencies concerned with welfare, notably the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Labor Organization (ILO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and most recently, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This growth in the volume of outpost activities has led not only to the establishment of field offices in many countries but to an increasing consideration of the pros and cons of devolving the administration of aid programs from central headquarters to the country or regional level.

The Institutional Framework for Technical Assistance: A Comparative Review of UN and US Experience

International technical aid programs, under the impetus of the Point Four idea, have now been functioning for three years. The time has perhaps come to review program operations in terms of some of the practical problems that have confronted the managers of the United Nations and United States programs. Such an evaluation, however tentative in character, may throw light on the potentialities and difficulties of the multilateral versus the bilateral framework for technical assistance. Exaggerated claims and counter-claims have been advanced with respect to the two processes. What does the record to date appear to reveal?

Trends in United Nations Administration

The Soviet attack on the United Nations during the Fifteenth General Assembly, along with the Congo operation, has served to dramatize the emergence of the World Organization as a far-flung administrative instrumentality. Initially organized primarily to manage meetings and to provide clearing-house functions, the UN Secretariat has progressively taken on a wide variety of “action research†projects both in New York and in the regional economic commissions. More important still, it has become engaged in a complex congeries of field programs which now absorb roughly half the time of its professional personnel. Not only does it help to plan economic, social, and technical programs of increasing magnitude, but it undertakes to implement such programs around the globe—often in cooperation with one or more of the specialized agencies. Certain of these programs, e.g., the Special Fund and OPEX (Operational, Executive, and Administrative Personnel), owe their design in large part to ideas originating within the UN bureaucracy: spurred by the Secretary-Generals leadership the staff has dared to improvise and to innovate as the political climate has permitted.

WOLF MENDL. Deterrence and Persuasion : French Nuclear Armament in the Context of National Policy, 1945-1969. Pp. 256. New York: Praeger, 1970.

(p. 253). On occasion, McSherry is carried away by his arguments, including this non sequitur: &dquo;In the past, at least, the democracies have been saved from their folly by the foolishness of their enemies. Some of the policies advocated by the editorial pages of the New York Times, for example, have been exceeded in fatuity only by some of those actually adopted by totalitarian regimes&dquo; (p. 244). There are minor faults in McSherry’s study. In the selected bibliography, the primary and secondary sources are lumped together. The publisher should be awarded one tiny scallion for setting the documentation at the back of the book.

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the other elements in the party; lines of cleavage have run through all of them. It casts doubt upon the supposedly democratic and &dquo;grass roots&dquo; origin of political policy; on the contrary, individual apathy, infrequent meetings, and sometimes indirect elections enable small groups of activists to exert ten or fifteen times their numerical strength at the party conference, ’where some five million votes are regularly cast on behalf of men who have not participated in the decision. Generally a number of

PHILIP M. WILLIAMS and MARTIN HARRISON. De Gaulle's Republic. Pp. vii, 279. London: Longmans, 1960.

done. Rather, it was to keep those advisers from degenerating into mere theoreticians, divorced from the practical problems of government. The Emperor, a man of action himself, never overcame his suspicion of the cloistered man of thought. He felt that if the men who drafted his laws could be immersed frequently in the tasks of daily administration, they might be protected against &dquo;that systematizing spirit, that tendency to ideology and metaphysics&dquo; which must always afflict policy-formulators who think too much and act too little. M. Durand believes that Napoleon’s experiment was, on the whole, a wise and successful one, and that its drawbacks were clearly outweighed by its advantages. He admits, however, that there can be too much of a good thing, and that the Emperor carried the practice to excess. The Councillors’ energies were so often diverted to other duties that the Council of State was