Stassen's Parliament

America's discussion and debate, its hopes and cynicisms about the post-war world, moved last week to a new plane. From Minnesota's Governor Harold Edward Stassen, a young (35), realistic United Nations statesman, came the most specific program yet laid down for world cooperation.

Said Governor Stassen, at a meeting of the Foreign Policy Association in Minneapolis :

"Perhaps the greatest present deterrent to increasing world cooperation is a tendency on the part of many people to admit its desirability, to acknowledge the correctness of general statements on the subject, but to say it is impossible to work out. . . .

"It is my proposal that we should contemplate, and begin to plan now, for a definite continuing organization of the United Nations of the World. China, Russia, the British Commonwealth of Nations, the United States of America, and all of the smaller United Nations should participate in this governmental structure. On this basis the citizens in this room, the citizens of this state in the years ahead would be not only citizens of Minnesota, not only citizens of the United States of America, but also citizens of the United Nations of the World.

"The key governmental device should be a single-house parliament. . . . The representatives in the parliament would be selected in each nation in accordance with the means by which the people select the members of their own legislative body."

World Chairman. Out of Governor Stassen's world parliament would arise a world council, its chairman selected by the parliament, its seven members then chosen by the chairman with approval of parliament. With a legislative body and an executive branch, the Government of the United Nations could then get to work on a world program which Governor Stassen had previously proposed (TIME, June 15) --including disarmament of Axis nations, a United Nations court and military force, administration of international airports and sea lanes, programs to increase world literacy and world trade. ("Only in this way can those countries with high standards of living maintain those standards without war.")

The Stassen proposal marked a milestone in post-war thinking chiefly because it got down to concrete cases. The great debate on the post-war world had begun only last May, with Vice President Henry Wallace's speech on the "century of the common man." Since then statesmen of both parties had moved step-by-step, speech-by-speech, toward what looked increasingly like a common objective. Still to be heard from was Franklin Roosevelt, carefully staying out of the debate himself, biding his time and avoiding commitments.

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