The Pan American System and the United Nations

IN 1946 the Ninth International Conference of American States, the first full Pan American Conference since the Lima Conference of 1938, is due to meet at Bogot'a; and like the first Conference to be held after the first World War, the Santiago Conference of 1923, it should have before it proposals decisively affecting the future growth and development of the regional inter-American system. The Pan American system, which Mr. Sumner Welles described in 1942 as a "cornerstone of the world structure of the future," is in strict accuracy neither Pan American nor systematic. It is not Pan American because Canada is not a member, though from time to time suggestions have been put forward by one or another of the Latin American States that she should be invited to join. Nor are the colonies and possessions of the European Powers in the western hemisphere represented in it. It is not systematic, mainly because its many institutions have been the result of growth and of adaptation to circumstances rather than of formal design. Hitherto it has had no centralized administration, no written constitution similar to the United Nations Charter, no Council, no Assembly, no Permanent Court. Only a few of its organs are based on formal conventions. It has had no coercive authority. The Union of American Republics (to give the Pan American system its proper name) is an entirely voluntary association of theoretically equal sovereign States, each of which is free to reject at will any or all of the resolutions of the Union or its agencies. The Union has now been in existence for more than half a century, but it is only comparatively lately that it has begun to assume the features of a genuine system of regional security, political and economic. It consists, first, of the International Conferences of American States, which meet at periodic intervals and are limited in their scope only by their own agenda; secondly, of specialized and technical conferences, called for specific purposes, as well as, since 1939, of consultative meetings of American Foreign Ministers; thirdly, of the Pan American Union in Washington, which is the permanent commission of the International Conferences of American States; and fourthly, of a variety of permanent, or semi-permanent, offices, boards and committees, some of which have been only remotely connected with the Pan American Union itself, and whose inter-relationships are exceedingly complex. With this framework of inter-American organization there is also associated an elaborate network of declarations, resolutions and conventions designed, not altogether successfully, to ensure the preservation of peace in the western hemisphere.