1825 



The regional approach comports with the Jeffersonian principle 

 of fixing governmental responsibility for a given function at the 

 lowest (or most localized) level at which it can be performed effectively. 

 Properly carried out it also meets the Hamiltonian requirement for 

 sufficient centralized direction to accomplish coherently the purposes 

 in view. It is easier for the members of a regional association to- 

 identify and act upon their readily identifiable common interests 

 than it is for United Nations members as a whole to perceive and 

 respond to their less evident or specific shared goals. Regionalism 

 is a middle way: 



Beyond bilateral deals and specialized multilateral dealings, there is the regional 

 level of cooperation. Neighbors should first settle their own disputes; that is the 

 conventional wisdom. It has a long and distinguished lineage. 



• •••••• 



Several years ago Sir Oliver Franks . . . described regionalism as "a halfway 

 house at a time when single nations are no longer viable and the world is not 

 ready to become one." *^^ 



The Mekong Project offers testimony to the durability of the 

 regional approach in the face of great obstacles. That it was kept 

 going in the face of war, insurrection, and nonrecognition of the 

 participants implies not only that the need for it was recognized by 

 those responsible within the region but also that they were able to 

 work together in support of the project despite political differences. 

 The evidence presented in the basic study indicates thiit in doing so 

 they relied heavily on reaching agreement by consensus rather than 

 by more formal means, such as parliamentary procedure.*** To the 

 e.xtent that they did so they were perhaps showing the developed 

 world, with its Western habits of parliamentary decisionmaking by 

 majority rule, what is for most of the world a more natural way to 

 make progress in regional arrangements, and what may prove to be 

 a more effective way to proceed in the global forum of the U.N. 

 General Assembly: 



To convert the U.N. system to consensus decision-making will seem visionary 

 only to Americans and Europeans who have grown up in the belief that parlia- 

 mentary procedure and Robert's "Rules" are the very stuff of democracy. But 

 that is a minority view in the modern world, and even in the West is a rather 

 recent notion, not deeply rooted in classical or Christian thought. "Consensus" 

 will not seem extraordinary to any one who has participated in a Quaker meeting, 

 grown up in a modern family, or sat on a British or American jury. It will not 

 seem strange to a Japanese businessman, a Chinese scholar, an African villager. 

 Chaidir Anwar Sani, the Indonesian delegate to the U.N., . . . [has] charted 

 a way out: "Indonesia," he said, "has a tradition of decision making through 

 musyawarah and mufakat, consultations and consensus. INIost of our countries 

 have at one stage or another known that method. The process may be lengthy, 

 cumbersome, sometimes exasperating, but we are much better off than im- 

 mediately after our independence when we experimented with the "half-plus-onc- 

 is-right" method. 



. . . My delegation would not like to see the United Nations turn into an 

 arena for confrontation between majority and minority, or a factory to turn out 

 resolutions, but a forum for the combined and concerted efforts of all the countries 

 in the world to find concrete solutions." *^^ 



"3 Harlan Cleveland, The Obligations of Power: American Diplomacy in the Search for Peace, New York, 

 Harper and Row, 1966, pp. 58 and 62. 

 *»* Huddle, op. cit. See especially pp. 384-394. 

 «5 Harlan Cleveland, "The U.S. vs. the U.N.?" New York Times Magazine, May 4, 1975. 



