World Government Plan Discussed

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27690, 21 June 1955, Page 9

World Government Plan Discussed

(N.Z. Press Association —Copyright) (Rec. 8 p.m.) STANFORD (California), June 19. The world needed international organisation but the time was not ripe for world government. Mr Dag Hammarskjold. the Secretary-General of the United Nations, said today. Mr Hammarskjold gave the principal address at graduation ceremonies at Stanford University. “We i undoubtedly need world organisation, but we are far from ripe for world government,” he said. “Indeed, even modest attempts at regional ‘integration’ have met with considerable difficulties, not because of any superstitious respect for national sovereignty, but because the peoples want to know in whose hands they put their fate, if they are to surrender part of their self-determination as nations.

“How often have we not seen those who most eagerly plead for integration among other countries themselves shrink back from even the slightest discipline of their own sovereign rights?” Mr Hammarskjold * said the older nations should meet with “enthusiasm and understanding” the efforts of formerly politically submerged peoples to form independent states. Nationalism among the older countries based upon resistance to change, was doomed to failure.

The longer the change was resisted and the adjustment shirked, “the more violent would be the Anal reaction when the walls collapse,” Mr Hammarskjold said.