The “New Quality” of NATO-Russia relations, solemnly stated in the declaration of the twenty heads of State and Governments gathered together in the air base of Pratica di Mare near Rome at the end of last May, is the happy implementation of the program drafted by the NATO Council of last December when the nineteen foreign ministers of the member countries “commit[ted themselves] to forging a new relationship between NATO Allies and Russia… with the goal of creating a new council, bringing together NATO member states and Russia, to identify and pursue opportunities for joint action at 20”.

A body able to act as that “effective mechanism for consultation, cooperation, joint decision, and coordinated/joint action” announced in Brussels is a beginning, but, as President Chirac said in his Intervention, “it is not enough to adopt texts, above all it is necessary to let them live … to adopt habits of work…” and to shape new mental attitudes in the diplomatic and military milieus.

In awaiting the achievement of all of these developments, there is, at the moment, the pledge of all twenty countries attending the meeting to build together a lasting peace in the Euro-Atlantic area on the principles of democracy and cooperative security.

This security is expressly declared as indivisible for every State of the area involved, recalling a concept introduced and reiterated insistently after the First World War by the Russian foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, who tried to ensure that the other European powers would take the security concerns of Moscow as seriously as their own, in the first attempts of European diplomacy to put in place a system of collective security that would be really effective, at least for their continent.

In the Rome declaration, it is stated that the new council will be the framework where the NATO member States and Russia will identify and pursue opportunities for joint action at twenty, working as equal partners in areas of common interest by taking joint decisions and bearing equal responsibility for their implementation.

The ways and means of operation of the new body will follow the ones of NATO’s already existing structures, starting from the method of adopting decisions by consensus and with roughly the same levels of responsibilities and decision preparations involved (meetings of foreign and defense ministers, ad hoc committees and subcommittees etc.) and a slight reduction in the number of meetings.

The list of areas of common engagement, which does not exclude the possibility of further addition, is as follows: the struggle against terrorism as the main and most pressing task, crisis management, the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, arms control and confidence building measures, military to military cooperation, search and rescue at sea, civil emergencies and theater missile defense (TMD).

This last point is particularly meaningful because it implies the readiness of the USA to share with its allies, and even more with Moscow, the strategic advantage of missile defense, a project originally seen as involving some sort of separation of American security from Europe’s and a breakthrough in strategic competition with the Kremlin, to be interpreted, moreover, as the most warlike signal of the unilateralist drift of the George W. Bush administration.

Enhancing consultations on TMD concepts, terminology and capabilities, analyzing and evaluating possible levels of inter-operability among respective systems, including even the hypothesis of joint training, is a program that is hardly reconcilable with a policy of unilateralism and selfish advantage-seeking.

One very meaningful aspect of this basic trend toward an action of the new body that is fully coherent with the other existing levels of multilateral international cooperation for the council members, is the reference, at the end of the declaration, to the UN Charter, to the provisions and principles of the Helsinki Act and to the OSCE Charter of European Security, as well as the expressed intention to observe in good faith the respective already-existing obligations under international law.

An even more tangible sign of the desire for practical coordination with the other wider bodies of cooperative international security is the fact that the last part of the decision approving the document envisaged the task for Robertson to provide a text for the Secretaries General of the UN and OSCE, the two existing international organizations, respectively universal at global and regional levels and concerned with the security of the Euro-Atlantic region.

The addresses made by the leaders attending the meeting can be very useful to better understand the type of implementation each had in his mind for the program described above.

At the opening of the meeting, NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson stressed its great importance by defining the impending decision as a reversal of contemporary history if the leaders of twenty of the most powerful nations assembled, not to carve up the world, but to unite it and to agree on the search for common solutions according to common interests for future issues - a search not only in terms of studies, analysis and discussions, but also and above all in terms of decisive action.

In referring to the coming into existence of the NATO-Russia Council, the Secretary General added that all members around that table would work together as equal partners and asked them to instruct their people to work in the logic of the common interest, otherwise the effectiveness of the council would be lost.

This concept of equal partnership among the members of the new body was particularly meaningful in relation to the newcomer, Russia, a nation which, since the final stages of the Second World War, had been complaining about its exclusion from the core decision-making of the major western powers.

The importance of easing these preoccupations on the Russian side is witnessed not only by making the equal partnership the first point of Robertson's remarks, soon after the approval of the declaration, but also by the bold print used in the official NATO document for these two words of the Secretary's speech.

The Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, as the host of the meeting, vindicated the role of his government in declaring the meeting under way and subsequently, in accelerating the opening up and the integration of world policy, thanks to the reassurance given by parliament's support and by the dynamic solidarity of the European and NATO leaders.

Within the wider perspective of an energetic, generous and effective foreign policy in the expansion of freedom, he defined the new council as an innovative and formidable instrument for promoting world security and peace. It marked Russia's opening up to the West, and vice versa, was a prerequisite for the finalization of the project for global security and the new international order, being developed by Americans and Europeans alike, in the fight against terrorism.

The new context saw Europe rediscovering a common destiny with 144 million citizens of the Russian Federation and with the young democracies of Eastern Europe, some of them moving towards full integration with NATO and an enlarged European Union.

The speaker, taking a bolder stance than that of his colleagues attending the meeting, stressed his support for a broader and more stringent procedure for opening up the European Union to Russia, far beyond the form of membership existing at the moment, a process to be implemented gradually but with a clear-cut final strategic objective of creating a community of Europeans able to secure peace and international cooperation in all fields of civil life.

Recalling the full coherence with these goals of the action of the Italian delegation at the European Convention, Berlusconi, mentioning a recently-published article by the Czech president, Vaclav Havel, warned that the grouping of nations currently taking place could give rise to the suspicion that the richer northern hemisphere was in some way ganging up against the rest of the world. The Italian government was engaged in promoting a policy against the imbalances and inequalities in the world which were an impediment to the basis of the new international order created with the United Nations Charter after the Second World War.

If freedom will not expand, it will retreat into its western fortress and will wither away. That is why the western governments will promote development across frontiers in order to foster effective opportunities of co-existence between different cultures and civilizations. Italy was ready to share in a grand plan that measures up to its role and its best humanist tradition.

Putin, the first of the guest premiers to take the floor, fully agreed on the great importance of the meeting under way, recalling that only quite recently such a gathering among Russian and NATO leaders would have been "simply unthinkable". Rejoicing over the achievement of the commonality of basic security interests when faced with the new danger of terrorism, he likened the 11th September tragedy to the very recent slaughter of women and children in the Russian city of Kaspiisk the previous 9th May.

The challenge of this new threat was a test for the existing institutions and forms of international cooperation; a test to be passed with patience and strong political will in order to shape a truly effective architecture capable of reliably defending their common interests and peace and security, again qualified as indivisible. In any case, the Russian president considered that the construction of fundamentally new relations was only at the beginning, but its success would allow the twenty to implement their intention to carry out the responsibility for the maintenance of peace and stability throughout the world.

He insisted that the Rome document need not be a statement of intentions, but a basis for joint constructive action; his country was in fact interested in a working instrument capable of being part of the network of universal and regional organizations operating in the field of ensuring security.

Russia needed this security, in any case, to be pursued using a “multi-vector” approach, due to her geopolitical location which, even in the presence of a ‘full immersion' in Europe, should not allow the mechanism of cooperation in the CIS and in Asia to be underestimated.

Stressing again the need to move along the path of building the new relationship among the twenty, he said this result will be possible not only out of mutual respect, but also because of the strong desire to search for new points of contact.

For George W. Bush, taking the floor after Putin, the new council offered Russia a path toward forming an alliance with NATO and toward starting to cooperate in the near future on the basis of an equal partnership. Of major importance were the areas identified as those for which greater cooperation was desired: missile defense and, strictly linked to it, that of airspace control.

These two points deserve particular attention as they marked a more specifically and directly expressed readiness by the USA to discuss and coordinate a program which originally appeared as intended to create a divide between America's security and her allies' security and to gain, at the same time, a substantial strategic advantage over Moscow. It is true that, in the comments following the summit, when discussing the prospects of cooperation in this field, the American side recalled the property rights and the patents resulting from the expensive research already under way in this very sensitive field; but in this case, it is reasonable to expect that policy will prevail over the logic of profit, as is happening in the equally important field of drugs against AIDS in the developing countries.

The French President Chirac then defined the creation of the new council as the evolution needed for the Atlantic Alliance after the end of the Cold War, recalling that it had been France that had first suggested the association of Russia with NATO, leading to the signature of the Founding Act in 1977. He too stressed the full parity Russia was to enjoy in the new body and the need, already mentioned above, to transform into concrete measures the intentions announced in the texts approved and to push for an adequate change in working habits by the officers responsible for their implementation.

Referring - the only attending western leader to do so - to the Russia-EU summit scheduled for the day after in Moscow, Chirac brought Europe into the picture, adding that after the success in establishing new relations with NATO, it was necessary to strengthen ties also with the European Union, whose global competences now allowed for the development of partnerships in all areas. He concluded by mentioning the bilateral agreement signed two days earlier in Moscow by Putin and Bush as further enabling Russia to play her traditional role of a great nation in a united and harmonized Europe.

In his very concise speech, the British Prime Minister Blair stated that Russia, North America and Europe faced many of the same challenges and shared many of the same goals. He too reaffirmed the equal partner condition to be enjoyed by Russia and the need to change, to that end, mindsets and institutional arrangements.

The same points of equal partnership and joint responsibility in the implementation of council decisions for Russia were raised in the “statement” of the German Chancellor Schroeder, who went on to stress more specifically the point of the fight against the proliferation of WMD by reference to the need to strengthen arms control and confidence-building measures on nuclear weapons and protection from weapons of mass destruction.

Expecting fruitful developments of the works to be started inside the council, Schroeder touched on the very sensitive point of the next NATO summit in Prague, where the awkward (for Russia) decisions about the alliance’s enlargement were foreseen, and invited Putin to attend that meeting as well, in order to “take [first] stock” of the results achieved inside the structure of cooperation that had just been put in place.

He then concluded with strong personal praise for Putin and his policy of opening up his country and of solidarity with the west in the anti-terrorist struggle.

Of a rather different flavour was the Polish President Kwasniewski's praise for Putin, as the author of Russia’s choice to side with the west after 11th September, and the consequent redefinition of security priorities and defense methods. In the context, the speech looked as if Putin had passed some sort of exam.

Kwasniewski went on to mention the satisfaction of the Polish people with the start of the process in Poland that had led to the downfall of communism, the end of the Warsaw Pact and of a balance of power in Europe based on fear, giving way to the idea of a continent of free people, united and secure.

As a member of NATO since 1999, and as a neighbour for centuries, Poland had made its contribution to the improvement of relations with Russia, proving that the doubts of Moscow about her relations with the West, which emerged after Poland's accession to the alliance, had been misplaced. NATO needed to be considered by all Russian citizens not as an old enemy or rival, but as a trustworthy and necessary partner.

The impending decision at next November's meeting on the enlargement of the alliance will, according to Kwasniewski, strengthen its role as security guarantor and will contribute in mitigating potential tensions among individual countries. Then, perhaps forcing the real situation, he appreciated the fact that Russia was "also aware of the benefits and new opportunities resulting from the NATO enlargement as well as from cooperation with Ukraine". In any case, the alliance will preserve its functions, remaining the guarantor of the US presence in Europe as the reassurance for its security and unity.

The address of the Czech President Vaclav Havel was also noteworthy: he stated that he was happy about the beginning of the new era of cooperation between NATO and Russia, and he urged the alliance to deepen its relations also with the other large entities of the contemporary world in order to avoid the impression that the more affluent northern hemisphere was uniting at the expense of the south.

Peace needed to be fostered all around the world and differences between cultures or spheres of civilization had to be interpreted as impulses to promote better knowledge of one another and not as a reason for enmity or confrontation.

Mentioning the next meeting in Prague and avoiding the almost provocative tones of his Polish colleague, he expressed the hope of seeing there all the leaders sitting at the Rome table, bearing witness to the practical effectiveness of their newly-initiated relationship but also to NATO's commitment in gradually building up its relations with all the other parts of the world.

The conversations held after the council by some of the leaders with the journalists attending the event are very useful for a better understanding of the important features of the real attitudes of the two main powers involved.

Putin soon clarified the wider pattern of security arrangements he had in mind, recalling his statement about a new global security architecture made the previous September in Berlin at the Bundestag; an objective that the addition of potentials of the twenty will surely help to achieve.

Warning that the partner-like relations to be established between Russia and NATO on the basis of the Rome declaration will, in any case, leave some differences of views on certain security problems, he assured that the weight of the questions to be addressed as a whole will be prevalent.

The formation of a common European security space without dividing lines was of fundamental importance and, moreover, it would also aid in maintaining security and stability throughout the rest of the world. Fully coherent with this perspective was his renewed insistence, after the official statement at the Council, on the respect for the rules of international law, the UN Charter and other region-wide security agreements.

Stressing that the partner-like relations envisaged by the declaration needed to be based on the mutual respect for the interests of each one of the parties, he added that returning to the family of civilized nations will stop the sort of confrontation with the rest of the world that had been pursued by Russia for so long, and will allow her voice to be heard and to be taken into account, and its national interests to be considered and recognized.

On the point of prospective NATO enlargement, Putin confirmed the already well-known critical attitude of his country, also answering a more specific question about his opinion on the possibility of Ukraine’s full entry into NATO. He insisted on the present very close relations existing between Moscow and Kiev, once again reaffirming its right to freely choose the means of ensuring its own security, saying he did not exclude the possible choice of its participation in the council that had just been established.

Finally, answering a question on the likely reservations and jealousy of the Europeans over the bilateral agreements entered into by himself and President Bush just before the Rome meeting, he said that first of all he had not perceived any uneasiness among his European colleagues and that Russia had always regarded the developments of its relations with the USA and NATO as a good bridge for the improvement of contacts with a United Europe as well as with its other partners. After having paid this tribute of expressed attention to the European Union, with the reaffirmation of Russia being an appurtenance to the old continent, he recalled also the specific geopolitical position of his country and the consequential need to pursue a balanced policy in the west as well as in the east.

The global approach was also the starting point of the introduction made to the journalist by Secretary Powell, who stressed the success of the US President's trip to Europe and the importance of the results achieved.

His answers ranged from the Palestine question, where he reaffirmed American support for the establishment of a Palestinian State in a context fully coherent with the Israelis’ security needs, to the strategic arms control agreement, arrived at in Moscow a few days earlier, and to the American plans for central Asia, where he affirmed the US was not seeking bases for long-standing military presence but only facilities allowing them the ability to intervene effectively against any re-igniting of terrorist or WMD threats.

Focusing on NATO-Russia relations, he expressed the intention of making the new body an “action-oriented council”, that is, not just a grouping for discussions and analysis but an instrument of action on the issues taken up, initially the ones listed in the declaration, but with the hope that this list would grow.

To the question if that could mean the expectation of full NATO membership for Moscow, Powell answered that the core business, ex Art. 5 of the treaty, was not included in the competence of the new council, and moreover he did not think that Russia was considering applying for NATO membership.

Equally adamant was the Secretary on the question about a possible change of Russia’s basic political orientation toward the west and NATO. First of all he declared he did not consider such a course likely, because for him after the bad results of its previous policies Moscow had come to the realization that its future lies to the west, just as the west realizes that its future lies with Russia.

In any case, he added, the USA government retained further defense against the uncertainties of the future, reserving the necessary military and nuclear forces for such a case.

Such an eventuality would be very unlikely, given that even the disagreement about NATO enlargement, which still exists on the Russian side, has been unable to stop or delay the creation of the newly-established structural connection between Russia and NATO.

Asserting that new countries will be invited by NATO to join the fall summit in Prague after having been successful in making that question less of a problem for the Russians and less of an irritant in their reciprocal relations, Powell raised the question of the polemics about the unilateralist trend of the Bush administration raised in certain European circles.

Where the US has a deeply-felt principle not shared by friends and allies, he stated, normally they discuss it with a very forthright attitude in an attempt to reach a common view, but if that proves to be impossible, the US will stick to its position, because for them it is the right one. That does not mean unilateralism or going its own way by Washington, it is simply disagreement which is perfectly acceptable because membership of a great alliance and of the Euro-Atlantic community does not mean reaching a consensus on every issue.

Recalling, by way of example, the discussions about the abandonment of the ABM treaty, Powell stressed how the doubts and perplexities of the European allies proved groundless if Russia, after the rejection of the treaty by the US, had accepted to join the new council and shortly before that had also agreed on a very huge cut in strategic forces; even China, on its side, did not appear to be on the verge of beginning an arms race.

Also before the press, President Chirac recalled that France had been the first of the alliance countries to suggest the association of Russia in the effort of defense and security of Europe, obtaining the first result of the signing of the “Founding Act” in 1977 and the establishment of the Joint Permanent Council.

The freeze following the Balkan crisis had been overcome and now he saw the opportunity to build a new European world for the future. The danger that the new council could also prove to be an empty shell, as was suggested in a question put to him, was rather far-fetched because, with the Putin presidency, Russia had started along a path of political and economic reforms aimed at its full integration in the historical process of world development. So now there was a convergence of interests, as they are conceived by the leaders of the twenty countries assembled in Rome.

Interests focused firstly on the fight against terrorism, a phenomenon which has always existed but which today is capable of employing exceptional means, and which must be faced through exceptional action, to be waged by all the countries of the world, since the association of the twenty northern countries did not mean the building of a new wall between the north and south.

According to Chirac, no part of the developing world could be specifically associated with terrorism; he never believed in the clash of civilizations, and so all the world had to be engaged in this struggle, calling on the UN to play a special role in this fight.

In his conversation with the journalist, Chirac was keen not to forget the European Union, which was mentioned in a question referring to the statement of the Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, who had expressed the hope of early membership for Russia also in the EU.

On this point he expressed a different attitude, defining such a hypothesis as rather untimely, and arguing that Russia, as a great country, at the same time both European and Asian, could not tie itself so strictly and exclusively to Europe, as full membership of the EU would entail. On the other hand, Europe had already shown its interest in the improvement of relations with Russia by supporting the first French move for the “Founding Act”.

Further room for cooperation with Moscow would be offered by the expected developments in the field of the European common security and defense policy.All these very meaningful episodes of multilateral diplomacy occurred in Rome only four days after the brief but very fruitful visit of the American President in Moscow, where he was able to substantially agree with his Russian counterpart on most of the points, which would be later approved in Rome, and on some very important additional ones.

The first and most significant was the treaty of strategic offensive reduction, but there was additionally the joint declaration that pre-announced the following one in Rome, which already substantially embodied its contents at the level of bilateral relations.

Then there were a number of statements of far-reaching developments: on anti-terrorism cooperation, on people to people contacts, on economic cooperation and on a new US-Russian energy dialogue.

The overall pattern suggests that before the strengthening of the ties between Russia and the western allies, the United States wanted to establish a mechanism of direct coordination with Moscow of a mutual policy on most of the questions to be raised by the twenty as well as some additional ones.

This sort of parallelism can be seen rather evidently, for instance, in the decision, at the end of the joint declaration, of the two Presidents to establish a Consultative Group for Strategic Security, chaired by the Foreign Ministers and the Defense Ministers with the participation of other senior officers, a body of a shrunken two-sided correspondence to the NATO-Russia council.

We can see even more clearly in the counter-terrorism statement, the attempt to balance between the fast-action orientation of the American side and the prudence of Moscow in allowing further changes to the status quo, which has already been repeatedly altered - and certainly not for the better - over the last few years.

In the first part of their text, the two Presidents reaffirmed their commitment to fighting terrorism in all its forms and whenever it may occur, envisaging very wide areas of possible action in terms of space and ways and means of operation. On the other hand, in the following line it is stated that the anti-terror initiatives must be conducted in an atmosphere of rule of law and with respect for universal human rights, noting additionally that the UN Security Council Counter-terrorism Committee plays a key coordinating role in this struggle.

Of even greater importance, because of their impact on the security of the Euro-Atlantic community, are the objectives of the statement on the US-Russia Energy Dialogue aimed at “enhancing predictability of global energy markets and reliability of global energy supply” and at encouraging and easing the cooperation between Russian and American firms in the search for oil and production activities, as well as in the commercialization phases. A task to be carried out by another ad hoc established body is the Russia-American Working-Level Group on Energy Cooperation.

Due to the sharp increase in the efforts devoted by Russia to the production and international commercialization of its huge oil reserves, this agreement, on the one hand, will enable the west to escape from the frequently politically motivated blackmail from the traditional Middle East producers grouped in the OPEC cartel; on the other hand it will open up to American oil firms great opportunities of business in a rich and rapidly expanding market.

At this point the question put to Putin about possible European jealousy over the rapprochement between the two major powers was perhaps a little inappropriate because of the use of the term jealousy. What was being referred to was a set of questions about the possible preference in Russian-American business and political relations and its significance for Europe.

Logically, as Chirac hinted in his official intervention and in his comments with the journalists, a solution to this question could be to establish, not only in the field of economics but also in those of defense and security, as a means of further development inside the EU, some kind of parallelism between America’s agreements with Russia and those to be reached with the European Union.

This solution was perhaps totally acceptable to the Russians if we think of Putin’s answer to the question of jealousy over the agreements reached with President Bush only a few days earlier in Moscow, when the head of the Kremlin said that his country considered all the steps of NATO and American cooperation as bridges toward a United Europe.

Obviously, the full meaning of this assertion cannot be easily guessed at; in any case, if Europe can see the danger of a special and preferential relationship in this sort of duplication of bodies entrusted with some especially important policies at the level of 19+1 and at the level of two (USA-Russia), the interest of the present Moscow government in integrating as far as possible in the already-existing European mechanism could be the effective leverage for balancing the attraction exercised by the rough homogeneity of the States in some of the areas of stricter bilateral cooperation.

All these points can express the basic rationale and meaning of the “new quality” of NATO - or rather of western - relations with Russia developing after the Rome agreement, but a new quality in the relationship seems to be emerging also within the west between the USA and Europe, at least according to one thesis which, in this period, keeps appearing in several authoritative or at least widely-read magazines and papers in the USA.

We can assume as the starting point of this thesis the widely-discussed article of Robert Kaplan, “Power and Weakness”, published in the summer issue of the Policy Review, according to which Americans and Europeans no longer share the same view of the world: they do not even perceive the world where they live in the same way. This is because today's USA tends to resort to force more quickly and, compared with Europe, is less patient with diplomacy and shows a recurring tendency toward unilateralism in international affairs.

But it is perhaps a little premature to assess such a radical change in basic attitudes towards international relations of peoples whose political and social cultures have developed in a parallel way for so long just because the policy of a government in office for less than two years is characterized by wordings more than actions (at least until now) not in tune with the main European attitudes.

Moreover, the heart of the problem is not the use of military power in some very acute international crisis, but the conditions under which these interventions have to be made.

Taking for granted an international society, and looking at a “Hobbesian world where true security and the defence and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and [free and uncontrolled] use of military might” by the United States is a renunciation of all the efforts made after the First World War by European as well as American Governments to move toward an international order characterized by the rule of [international] law, where the application of military force, when needed, could acquire the sense of an operation of international policing rather than of an act of war.

This vision was the result of the thinking of the European philosophers and physiocrats of the 18th century, who never succeeded in seeing their ideas translated into a positive political project in Europe until the aftermath of the First World War, when that goal was accomplished by an American President, Woodrow Wilson, professionally a political expert and, in a way a continuator, of their ideas.

At the end of the war, he was able to persuade the great European powers to agree and cooperate in implementing a set of concepts, stated in his famous fourteen points, consisting in the repudiation of war as an instrument for solving international controversies, and then in the outright disavowal of the traditional machtpolitik waged until that moment by the European powers: the introduction of a democratic methodology in the practice of international relations by the rejection of secret diplomacy and a first hint at peoples' self determination.

At the end of this historic statement, there was the proposal to establish an international organization capable of mutually guaranteeing political and territorial independence to great as well as to small states.

Thanks to Wilson’s determination, this organization was in fact established by the peace conference of Paris as the League of Nations, setting up a completely new system of collective security where military actions were not completely excluded or forbidden, but were allowed as acts of implementation of the common will to restore the violated order of the global international community expressed by a decision of the League and substantially consisting in an operation of international policing.

It is true that the history of the League of Nations is a tale of failure, but the reasons for this are complex and connected to the lack of a real universality in its membership and the imbalances among the national interests of the main world powers involved in the status quo, to be guaranteed by the organization.

At the zenith of the Second World War, the American government, headed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, acknowledged how useful it would have been in the late thirties to have an effective world organization capable of stopping Hitler from his first initiatives of blackmail and aggression, and Roosevelt started to suggest publicly the establishment, after the terrible war then in progress had come to an end, of a global organization really capable of ensuring order and security in international society, and with a much higher degree of effectiveness: an international organization, this time, “with teeth”. These powers were to be at the service of all, and a set of concepts about the rules of behaviour of each member of international society is embodied in the Atlantic Charter and in the Declaration of the United Nations.

One of the points of these documents deserving perhaps specific mention is the denunciation of the imperialism that led, after the war, to most European powers giving up their colonies.

This policy was inspired not so much by the weakness of their armies after the hard fight against Germany (as has been wrongly hypothesized), but by the evolution of the political standards within their civil societies and the strengthening of the democratic sensibility of the voters and of their political leaders.

The policy was strongly supported and recommended by the United States, traditionally an anti-imperialist country, which was soon to enjoy the special status of nuclear super-power together with the Soviet Union, the latter also advocating an anti-imperialist policy together with its peculiar system of political values inspired by Marxian communism and the international class struggle.

The appeal for greater effectiveness of a body entrusted with guaranteeing peace and order after the war led to the creation of a new structure in international organization, a successor to the League of Nations, in a “less democratic” way, because this time the members did not all have the same influence on the decisions to be taken, but special status was granted to the main winners of the war allowing them permanent membership of the ruling (security) council and the right to block by veto any decision deemed unacceptable to any of them.

This solution was an attempt to reconcile the two conflicting and permanent exigencies of such a world body, the ability to “carry out” what had been decided while maintaining the consensus of all the other members of the organization in order to let them feel involved and jointly responsible for the actions decided upon.

The abolition of war as an instrument of international politics could never mean, in fact, the complete elimination of any military action in international society; a sanction against the illegal initiative of any State could be needed at any moment and, in order to allow these operations to be seen not as acts of war but as acts of international policing, it was necessary for them to have the wide support of all the international community and the disposal of an amount of comparative strength corresponding to the one enjoyed inside national States in their domestic policy towards criminals. To have all these elements at the same time, it was necessary for all the main factors of power of the system to be always joined together in support of the implementation of the sanction agreed upon by the UN, which means that no such decision could be taken by the Council against the will of any of the great powers, the permanent members of the Council.

This is very briefly the conceptual path of a vision of international relations originally conceived by European philosophers, translated into empirical politics by an American political expert who had managed to become president and to make his vision become reality, even without the support of his own country and without its having any real ability to be an effective instrument in genuinely shaping a new international order.

In any case, even with its failures, the League of Nations was the first international organization aimed at collective security to be concretely established in international society.

Well aware of the shortcomings of this first experience, in the worst moments of the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt and his New-Deal aides decided that a third conflict, like the one then in progress, had to be absolutely avoided and that the only way to achieve this goal was the establishment of an organization where all the countries, but first of all the great powers, could discuss the problems arising in the world and find a commonly agreed solution according to a set of principles echoing Wilson’s fourteen points, stated in the Atlantic Charter and later in the Declaration of the United Nations, signed by all the countries allied against Hitler’s Germany.

The Organization of the United Nations, established around the end of the war and unfortunately without Roosevelt who had died in the meantime, is, in a way, the combined legacy of the European philosophers of the 18th century, of an idealist American political expert, a follower of these philosophers who later became president of his country, and of an astute and skilled politician who, after guiding his country out of the “great depression”, laid the foundation stones of a new international order whose main principles were disputed by none, despite the wide ideological gap existing within the winning alliance.

After the NATO-Russia agreement of last May that gap may be considered as having been overcome, as is aptly expressed in the Rome declaration itself: “A New Quality”. The problem now could be the relinquishment by the United States of that rich and complex legacy of European and American thought combined with fine political skill, embodied in the UN and in its founding principles.

Prof AntonGiulio de Robertis, University of Bari, Italy