William Emmanuel Rappard, The United Nations as Viewed from Geneva (1946)

William Emmanuel Rappard’s article publishes an address delivered to the American Political Science Association on March 28, 1946. It examines the new United Nations from the overlapping perspectives of Europe, neutral Switzerland, and Geneva as the seat of the League of Nations. Its central argument is that the UN’s wartime origins explain both its institutional inequalities and its limitations as a system of collective security. Yet Rappard’s criticism culminates in conditional support: American participation is indispensable, and the organization’s conduct may prove better than its constitution.

Rappard opens by calling the UN an essentially American creation, dependent on American initiative and power. Addressing American colleagues, he presents frank criticism as an obligation of scholarly friendship. The address then divides into two sections: the first establishes Geneva’s historical and political vantage point; the second explains the Charter through the circumstances of its creation rather than through an article-by-article comparison with the League Covenant.

Geneva’s perspective begins with Europe’s loss of power. The continent that generated both world wars has forfeited its global dominance and much of its capacity for independent leadership. Decisive authority now belongs to powers situated outside continental Europe or only partly within it. Exclusion from the new organization compounds this displacement:

To view the United Nations from Geneva is therefore to see them from a continent which has so little influence over the new organization that it in fact feels almost foreign to it.

Switzerland’s estrangement is more specific. Its population had become closely acquainted with the League Covenant through the campaign preceding the 1920 accession referendum, whereas the UN originated among belligerents and excludes independent neutrality. Geneva also retains institutional and sentimental attachments to the League and the International Labor Organization. Its disappointment at the “de-Europeanization or Americanization” of organized peace nevertheless does not amount to hostility: Rappard explicitly offers support for the new organization’s difficult and essential task.

The second section makes wartime formation the explanatory key to the Charter. The UN emerged while victorious allies were still fighting a common enemy. Its membership consequently preserved the coalition’s boundaries, while its security arrangements extended the allies’ authority over the peace. Rappard contrasts the League’s formation after the First World War with the UN’s establishment before the end of the Second: the latter’s founders sought principally to preserve their own unity and protection, with the security of others a secondary consequence.

The deepest institutional consequence is the transfer of military hierarchy into international government:

In war there is and there can be no equality of nations. The powerful command and the weak obey.

Rappard distinguishes unequal influence from unequal legal obligation. Giving powerful states greater representation can be compatible with constitutional government; granting them immunity from rules binding everyone else is a more radical departure. The Charter’s profession of sovereign equality therefore conflicts with the permanent Security Council members’ privileged position. Smaller states surrender freedom of action without acquiring reliable protection against aggression undertaken or tolerated by a great power.

It is therefore not cynicism, but only clearsightedness, to note that the freedom of the under-privileged members of the United Nations is conditioned by the disunity of their privileged masters.

This formulation captures the paradox of Rappard’s critique. Great-power agreement makes centralized authority effective, but disagreement may preserve the autonomy of those subject to it. Meanwhile, the veto prevents collective security from reaching precisely those aggressions most likely to be dangerous. These arrangements are intelligible in a defensive wartime alliance whose members cannot readily contemplate conflict among themselves; they are inadequate as the constitution of a peaceful international community.

The Charter’s relative silence on general disarmament reinforces this diagnosis. For Rappard, reduced armaments are an index of security, even if not its necessary precondition. The founders’ reluctance to envisage disarmament reveals their limited confidence in the organization’s protective capacity.

Rappard then challenges the assumption that the League failed because its Covenant was defective and that the UN will succeed because its Charter is superior. The new institutions inherit much from Geneva while distancing themselves from their predecessor. More provocatively, the Covenant’s virtues may have contributed to its political rejection: a document granting the great powers unrestricted freedom might have attracted American participation, but would have been normatively inferior. Rappard treats the consequences of such an alternative history cautiously. His firmer conclusion shifts attention from constitutional promises to actual behavior:

One all-important fact should be stressed in conclusion: the international community, no less than the states which compose it, should be judged on its policies much more than on its constitution.

The League failed to meet its Covenant’s standards; the early UN appears capable of exceeding those of its Charter. This distinction grounds Rappard’s qualified hope. If veto privileges were the price of securing American cooperation, they might become “blessings in disguise,” provided the veto remains unused and inequality is eventually abolished. American isolationism, by contrast, would imperil peace itself. The address thus remains relevant as an early account of the tension between legal equality and effective power: institutional defects matter profoundly, but international organization ultimately depends on how powerful states exercise—or restrain—their authority.