York
City, hailed by 'Abdu'l-Baha thirty-seven years earlier as the "City of
the Covenant". During His visit there He had predicted: "There is no doubt
that ... the banner of international agreement will be unfurled here to
spread onward and outward among all the nations of the world."(92)

Significantly, it was also on the initiative of a political leader of one
of the Western hemisphere nations which had been addressed by Baha'u'llah,
that His summons to collective security--first reflected in the nominal
sanctions voted by the League of Nations against Fascist aggression in
Ethiopia--was at long last given practical effect. In November 1956, Lester
Bowles Pearson, then External Affairs Minister and later Prime Minister of
Canada, secured the creation by the United Nations of its first
international peacekeeping force, an achievement which won its author the
Nobel Prize for Peace.(93) The full nature of the authority contained in
such a mandate would steadily emerge as a major feature of international
relations during the second half of the century. Beginning with the
policing of agreements worked out between hostile states, the principle of
collective action in defence of peace gradually took on the form of
military interventions such as that of the Gulf War, in which compliance
with Security Council resolutions was imposed by force on aggressor
factions and states.

Along with the establishment of the new United Nations' system and steps
to enforce its sanctions, a second major breakthrough occurred. Even
before hostilities had ended, public audiences throughout the world were
stunned by film coverage of the liberation of Nazi death camps, which
exposed for all to see the horrific consequences of racism. What can
adequately be described only as a profound sense of shame at the depths of
evil that humanity had shown itself capable of committing shook the
conscience of humankind. Through the window of opportunity thus briefly
opened, a group of dedicated and far-sighted men and women, under the
inspired leadership of figures like Eleanor Roosevelt, secured the United
Nations' adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The moral
commitment it represented was institutionalized in the subsequent
establishment of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. In due
course, the Baha'i community itself would have good cause to appreciate,
at firsthand, the system's importance as a shield protecting minorities