state is in conflict with the provisions of this Treaty, and undertakes not to enter into any international engagement in conflict with this Treaty.

Article 9

The Parties hereby establish a council, on which each of them shall be represented, to consider matters concerning the implementation of this Treaty. The council shall be so organized as to be able to meet promptly at any time. The council shall set up such subsidiary bodies as may be necessary; in particular it shall establish immediately a defense committee which shall recommend measures for the implementation of Articles 3 and 5.

Article 10

The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European state in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty. Any state so invited may become a party to the Treaty by depositing its instrument of accession with the Government of the United States of America. The Government of the United States of America will inform each of the Parties of the deposit of each such instrument of accession.

Article 11

This Treaty shall be ratified and its provisions carried out by the Parties in accordance with their respective constitutional processes. The instruments of ratification shall be deposited as soon as possible with the Government of the United States of America, which will notify all the other signatories of each deposit. The Treaty shall enter into force between the states which have ratified it as soon as the ratifications of the majority of the signatories, including the ratifications of Belgium, Canada, France, Luxembourg, the Nether lands, the United Kingdom and the United States, have been deposited and shall come into effect with respect to other states on the date of the deposit of their ratifications.1

Article 12

After the Treaty has been in force for ten years, or at any time thereafter, the Parties shall, if any of them so requests, consult together for the purpose of reviewing the Treaty, having regard for the factors then affecting peace and security in the North Atlantic area, including the development of universal as well as regional arrangements under the Charter of the United Nations for the maintenance of international peace and security.

Instruments of ratification were deposited by original member or acceding countries on the dates indicated in the following order: Canada, May 3, 1949; the United Kingdom, June 7, 1949; Belgium, June 16, 1949; Luxembourg, June 27, 1949; Norway, July 8, 1949; the United States, July 25, 1949; Iceland, Aug. 1, 1949; the Netherlands, Aug. 12, 1949; Denmark, Aug. 24, 1949, France, Aug. 24, 1949, Italy, Aug. 24, 1949; Portugal, Aug. 24, 1949; Greece (accession), Feb. 18, 1952; Turkey (accession), Feb. 18, 1952; and the Federal Republic of Germany (accession), May 6, 1955.

Article 13

After the Treaty has been in force for twenty years, any Party may cease to be a party one year after its notice of denunciation has been given to the Government of the United States of America, which will inform the Governments of the other Parties of the deposit of each notice of denunciation.

Article 14

This Treaty, of which the English and French texts are equally authentic, shall be deposited in the archives of the Government of the United States of America. Duly certified copies thereof will be transmitted by that Government to the Governments of the other signatories.

In witness whereof, the undersigned Plenipotentiaries have signed this Treaty.

Done at Washington, the fourth day of April, 1949.

5. STATEMENT BY THE SECRETARY OF STATE BEFORE THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, APRIL 27, 1949 1

1

I welcome this opportunity to discuss with you the North Atlantic Treaty signed on April 4. That treaty is no new document to you. It has been developed, to an extent without parallel in my knowledge, as a cooperative enterprise between the executive and legislative branches of the Government and particularly between the Department of State and this Committee. Without the vision and assistance of your chairman, 2 of your former chairman, 3 and the members of this Committee, this treaty could never have been concluded. The text embodies many constructive suggestions from members of the Committee.

The President has spoken on the treaty in recent weeks, and the Department of State has made available a considerable amount of source material regarding it. Since you already have in your possession some of what I shall say today, I shall make my statement as short as possible and will then be at your disposal for questions. I should like briefly to review with you the reason for this treaty, and its purposes.

It has been well said that is prepared to work for it." than the American people. sought it in various ways,

"Everyone wants peace, but not everyone No people in this world want peace more They have always wanted it, they have but they have not always been ready to

1 Department of State Bulletin, May 8, 1949, pp. 594-599. For report by the Secretary of State to the President, Apr. 7, 1949, see A Decade of American Foreign Policy, pp. 1332-1339.

2 Senator Tom Connally.

Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg.

work for it. If we wish peace we must be prepared to wage peace, with all our thought, energy, and courage. That is the purpose of this treaty.

When the United States was a small and weak country, isolated by many weeks from other continents, our forefathers wisely based our foreign policy upon the realities of those times, and we managed to stay apart, to a large extent, from developments in other lands.

However, our responsibility for assisting in the maintenance of peace beyond our borders has been long recognized and assumed. For more than a century and a quarter this Government has contributed to the peace of the Americas by making clear that it would regard an attack on any American state as an attack on itself. We gave our unilateral declaration to this effect. As the years passed and our neighbors to the south grew in stature, they accepted a similar responsibility.

But beyond this responsibility, we did not see clearly the impact of an unstable world on our security. In 1920 many nations of the world joined in an attempt to maintain international peace and security through the League of Nations. Although the President of the United States had played a leading part in drafting the League Covenant, the United States was not prepared to enter the League, and we withdrew from the participation with other nations in their first effort to wage peace on a world-wide basis. As a consequence, we had no effective means to prevent the Second World War.

But by 1945 after the tragedy of involvement in a second world war, we realized fully that times had changed, drastically and irrevocably. It is the responsibility of this generation to base the conduct of foreign affairs upon the realities of today. Today no place on earth is more than a few hours distant from any other place. Today neither distance nor ocean nor air affords security. Security today and henceforward can only be assured, in the President's words, by stopping war before it can start.

In 1945 a new and greater effort for the maintenance of international peace and security was undertaken in the establishment of the United Nations. In the preamble of the Charter the peoples of the United Nations expressed their determination

3

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.

And for these ends

to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and

to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest . .

1 Reference to the Monroe Doctrine; see Memorandum on the Monroe Doctrine (Department of State publication 37; 1930).

2 For the annotated text of the Covenant of the League of Nations (articles 1-26 of the Treaty of June 28, 1919), see The Treaty of Versailles and After: Annotations of the Text of the Treaty (Department of State publication 2724; 1947), pp. 69 ff.

For the full text of the Charter, see supra, pp. 134-161.

The first purpose of the United Nations, as stated in article 1 of the Charter is

to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;

The American people overwhelmingly accepted this commitment and the other commitments laid down in the Charter. They showed not merely their desire for peace, but their determination to work for peace through full participation in "effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace and for the suppression of acts of aggression." The hopes of the American people for peace with freedom and justice are based on the United Nations.

The Charter not only spells out, as did the Kellogg Pact,' the essential principle of settling disputes by peaceful means instead of by war, it goes much further. The Charter commits all members of the United Nations to certain principles in the conduct of their foreign affairs which would, if carried out, do a number of things. First, they would secure peace and do away with the use of force as an instrument of national policy. Second, they would establish the right of nations to independence and self-determination. Third, they would establish that economic, social, and other problems can and should be worked out by international agreement and for the benefit of the peoples of all countries. Fourth, they would recognize and further human rights and fundamental freedoms. Here is more than a vague expression. These are the foundations of a world system, based on law, which would do far more than merely prevent war.

Still, the Charter goes further. It establishes machinery and procedures for furthering these purposes. The fundamental fact of the Charter is that these mechanisms and procedures are the institutions and procedures of free peoples, based on solving difficulties and making progress through investigation of facts, free discussion, and decisions by adjustment among representatives of the member nations, all of whom accept and are attempting to achieve the purposes of the world organization.

Now, any organization of free individuals or free peoples whether it is a private one, or a national one, or an international one, must proceed upon the basis that the vast bulk of those within it are firmly attached to the basic principles of the organization and are trying to carry them out. If this is so, adjustments are made within the area of common purposes; and, no matter how sharp disagreements may be, there are common principles to which appeal may be made and which basically govern the conscience and behavior of the members. Whenever a powerful minority repudiates the basic principles and uses the procedures to accomplish directly contrary purposes or to frustrate the organization, then it obviously will not work as intended. Here lies the basic difficulty which the United Nations has faced-a I Treaty of Aug. 27, 1928; 46 Stat. 2343-2348.

difficulty which would produce serious problems in any international organization, however perfectly devised. This difficulty is that a powerful group, even though a minority, has not genuinely accepted the purposes and principles of the organization and has used its institutions and procedures to frustrate them. This is not a defect of machinery. It is a defect in the basic attitude of some of the members which no change of machinery or procedure can cure.

One of the principal problems which has grown out of this situation which I have described is that a sense of insecurity and a fear of aggression have grown up in an important section of the world which is struggling to recover economically, politically, and socially from the drains of the last war. The recovery of this area is of vital concern to the whole world.

To attain a sense of security and to be free from the constant fear of armed attack is certainly one of the prime objectives of the United Nations. How, then, is this objective to be obtained when a few of the members of the United Nations frustrate the attempt to attain it through the machinery provided in the Charter? It is certainly not to be obtained by doing nothing about it. It is certainly not hostile to the United Nations or contrary to the Charter to attempt to attain this objective by methods wholly consistent with the Charter.

The United Nations is not a thing in itself. It is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. The end is progressive development of a peaceful and stable world order where law rather than force and anarchy will govern the conduct of nations in their foreign relations. It was never in the minds of the framers of the Charter that the organization set up under it should be so distorted as to become an international instrument which paralyzed the pacific nations of the world, the possible victims of aggression, while leaving a would-be aggressor with completely free hands to deal with them one by one. In order that there should be no misunderstanding on this point, article 51 was inserted in the Charter.

If I may use an understatement, the sense of insecurity prevalent in Western Europe is not a figment of the imagination. It has come about through the conduct of the Soviet Union. Western European countries have seen the basic purposes and principles of the Charter cynically violated by the conduct of the Soviet Union with the countries of Eastern Europe. Their right to self-determination has been extinguished by force or threats of force. The human freedoms as the rest of the world understands them have been extinguished throughout that whole area. Economic problems have not been solved by international cooperation but dealt with by dictation. These same methods have been attempted in other areas-penetration by propaganda and the Communist Party, attempts to block cooperative international efforts in the economic field, wars of nerves, and in some cases thinly veiled use of force itself.

By the end of 1947 it had become abundantly clear that this Soviet pressure and penetration was being exerted progressively further to the west. In January 1948, the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, said that if any one power attempted to dominate Europe by