Last week's U.N. story starts, properly, with a bearded, 16th Century Frenchman called Jean Bodin, who believed in witchcraft, numerology, astronomy a"nd national sovereignty.
He began a career as a political pundit when a Master of the Mint declared that prices had not risen in France in three centuries. Bodin answered in a sizzling pamphlet showing that in fact prices were going up & up, and God only knew where they would end. After that, he digressed from economics (publishing a treatise on witchcraft called the Demonomania of Sorcerers), and went on to six volumes of political theory, his major work, in which he set down the notion that the state is supreme and inviolable as a matter of natural right. That right, he said, springs from the people's need for a strong protecting hand in troubled times.*
More. & more people agreed with Bodin until states became so strong that citizens began to limit state powers by bills of rights and, more recently, to attempt to modify sovereignty by international organization.
The Russian position in Paris last week, on which the issue of war or peace heavily depended, had less to do with Marx and Lenin than with Jean Bodin. It was in large measure a pigheaded defense of natsionalny suverenitet unlimited.
The Strong Chest. Up for discussion in the U.N.'s Political Committee was the two-year-old U.S. proposal for international control and inspection of atomic energy. That was, in effect, a limitation of national sovereignty, for it provided that a worldwide agency would have the right to cross any country's frontiers and look into any country's factories. Cried Russia's Andrei Vishinsky: "Nobody will blind us and confuse us with beautiful words about the necessity of waiving part of our national sovereignty . . . The control agency would be an American agency ... an international monopolistic super-trust. [The overeager Russian-English interpreter rendered this as "superduper crook."] Our chest is strong; you cannot push us down. Our neck is not a chicken's neck . . ."†
Britain's Hector McNeil bitingly bore down on Vishinsky's reactionary nationalism. a"As a junior Socialist," he said, "I find it a little unusual to find my revoludenary friend objecting to such a concept as international ownership . . ."
Next day Vishinsky declared that Russia would agree to international control—if the control agency were subject to a Russian veto; that would mean no international inspection except as Russia specifically granted permission.
The Obsolete Doctrine. Russia's frantic insistence on national sovereignty was also demonstrated in the Commission on Human Rights, which was considering a worldwide Bill of Rights. Russia's Alexei Pavlov promptly cried that it represented interference with Russian sovereignty. Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak summed up the West's position when he cried: "We fear you when you preach this antiquated, obsolete doctrine of national sovereignty.. ."