Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 May 2009
Those of us who have lived through the growth of international organizations during the last 45 years have witnessed a remarkable series of transformations in their membership, their procedures, their authority, their effectiveness, and even in their fundamental conception, purposes, and function.
Designed to supplement the inherited and traditional political structure of the world, the League of Nations was to consist primarily of new arrangements for avoiding any repetition of the breakdown in the conduct of international relations represented by the outbreak of war in 1914. The United Nations, as originally conceived, was designed to be a central element in a political structure of a world which was recognized to be changing. But there was little appreciation, when the Charter was drafted, of how sudden, far-reaching, and decisive the changes would prove to be.
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