ABSTRACT

For all these many years since the United Nations was founded, a small, lonely band of scholars, including Professors Louis Sohn and Leland Goodrich, have toiled in the stony field of weighted voting by General Assembly. For almost all of those years, their efforts were dismissed with that ultimate weapon of verbal disapprobation: "academic". It should be remembered that many of these Afro-Asian nations were only recently colonies in which the colonial powers, small white minorities, used various systems of weighted voting to retain political control. These attempts were known as "fancy franchises". Most of the modern publicists recognize that equality can be the rule only among states having common standards of civilization. The insistence of new nations on "one state, one vote" is not only a way of seizing a measure of political power from the powerful nations of the West. It is also an expression of history of anti-colonialism, which took the form of campaigns for national liberation.