from the abuses of the past.

Highlighting the significance of both advances was the decision of the
nations that had triumphed in the recent conflict to put on trial leading
figures of the Nazi regime. For the first time in history, the leaders of
a sovereign nation--men who sought to argue the constitutionality of the
political positions they had occupied--were brought before a public court,
their crimes unsparingly reviewed and documented, were duly convicted, and
those who did not escape through suicide were then either hanged or
sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. No serious protest had been
raised against this procedure which, theoretically, constituted a
fundamental departure from existing norms of international law. Although
the integrity of the proceedings was gravely marred by the participation
of judges appointed by a Soviet dictatorship whose own crimes matched or
exceeded those of the defendants' regime, the act set an historic
precedent. It demonstrated, for the first time, that the fetish of
"national sovereignty" has recognizable and enforceable limits.

Beginning in these same years, the fulfilment of a long-delayed ideal
unfolded in the dissolution of the great empires that had not merely
survived 1918, but had managed even to extend their reach through
acquiring "mandates", "protectorates" and colonies seized from the
defeated powers. Now, these antiquated systems of political oppression
were submerged by a rising tide of movements of national liberation far
beyond their weakened abilities to resist. With astonishing swiftness, all
of them either willingly abandoned their claims or were forced by colonial
rebellions to bow to the same fate that had overtaken their Ottoman and
Hapsburg predecessors earlier in the century.

Suddenly, the peoples of the world found themselves with a place to stand
in dignity, a forum in which to express the concerns that most deeply
affected them, and the faint beginnings of a role in deciding their own
future and that of humanity in general. A corner had been turned that left
behind six or more millennia of history. Beyond all the continuing
educational disadvantages, the economic inequities, and the obstructions
created by political and diplomatic manoeuvring--beyond all these practical
but historically transient limitations--a new authority was at work in
human affairs to which all might reasonably hope somehow to appeal.
Representatives of once subject peoples