They might well, after the experience of the past twenty-five years, be somewhat less ambitious in their ideas of the kind of force which could be created. They might be wiUing to settle for one limited in size, to which the permanent members made identical contributions (if any), which would have no permanenr bases, and which would be used only for authorised operations of strictly limited duration. Any permanent force at all, even of earmarked contributions, would, it would be accepted, represent a bold initiative (indeed, the fact that the Western powers no longer control a majority in the organisation might well make them reluctant to contemplate even a limited force of this type).
But the fact is that, even if agreement had been reached upon all these points - and it is not altogether inconceivable that in a better political climate some compromise might have been found - it does not follo~ that it would have been possible to establish the kind of fmce that the Charter envisaged. For the most important and difficult questions to be decided were not those then debated at all. These were the principles for the command and control of the force, for authorising each operation and for arranging its financing (all of which were to create difficulties when peace-keeping forces were eventually set up). Far more than the size of the force or the balance between contributions, these fatally determine how far each particular operation may come to be used for political purposes which are unacceptable to one or another of the permanent members. Agreement on them would have been difficult, as subsequent discussions proved, at the best of times; but almost certainly quite beyond the range of the possible in the bitter political climate of 1946-7.
So the force which the Charter had contemplated never came into being. It was recognised that this need not necessarily make the UN totally ineffective, nor without any capacity to wield force at all. It could still call on member-states to use their own forces in particular situations (as the organisation subsequently did in Korea). All the non-military sanctions laid down in Chapter VII of the Charter could still be used if the will to use them existed. If both these courses have virtually never been adopted, it is not because of the failure of the negotiations of 1946-7. It is because the majority in the organisation, and in the Council, have not been ready to subject the loyalty of member-states to the suhstantial strain involved in calling on them to take strenuous action to meet threats to the peace which they may themselves not see as serious dangers to their own individual security.
In other words, the provisions of the Charter had not basically resolved the age-old problem of collective security: how to induce member-states to join in collective action when their own individual judgement does not drive them to do so. The failure of the Military Staff Committee negotiations merely stripped bare the pretence that the paper obligations of the Charter had finally resolved that problem. It made it the more necessary for the infant organisation to consider alternative means by which it could make its authority effective when the peace was threatened: to develop political skills rather than military enforcement power. It had no lack of opportunity to try its skills in this direction over the coming years.
