Page 19 - The Cormorant Issue 14

The United Nations: A Story Oft Untold
By Dr J Simon Rofe, University of Leicester
The United Nations Organisation is facing down a crisis; more precisely, ‘another’ crisis. Events in Tripoli en-route to Damascus via Cairo have captured the attention of the world’s media and made governments elsewhere across the broader Middle East nervous. The ‘Arab Spring’, as other populist movements have done in the past, has brought into sharp relief the power of the state and its leadership to counter their peoples.
For the United Nations the dilemma is captured in the open- ing six words of the preamble to the United Nations Charter: “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS...”.1 In these six words, read with the appropriate context, one can see the United Nations faces an internal contest between being a body for the ‘PEOPLES’, and one for its constituent members, ‘NATIONS’.
This dilemma is not a twenty-first century reading of a document that is over sixty-five years old. The oft overlooked fact is that the UN Charter was a contested document right from the start. Nothing perhaps illustrates this more succinctly than to consider the authorship of the UN Charter’s preamble. Though the repre- sentatives of almost fifty nations numbering over seven hundred gathered in San Francisco in the spring of 1945 in the aftermath of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, one individual above all oth- ers was responsible for the utopian preamble. As historian Mark Mazower writes, it was South African Prime Minister, Jan Smuts, who ‘did more than anyone to argue for, and help draft, the UN’s stirring preamble.’2 Yet at the same time as authoring the pream- ble with its aspirational goals to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’, establish a Human Rights agenda and calls for social justice with equal rights for men and women, he was also the ‘architect of white settler nationalism’ that gave way to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Smuts was not alone as someone holding views that seem incompatible with a contem- porary reading of the United Nations’ purpose. Such a dichotomy was recognised at the time: ‘many left the founding conference at San Francisco in 1945 believing that the world body they were being asked to sign up to was shot-through with hypocrisy.’3 The charge of hypocrisy is a strong one, and one that the United Nations has never been able to adequately quash in some quar- ters. Nonetheless, the views of those in San Francisco reflected the compromises that were made as the nations of the world saw an end to years of war and were given succinct expres- sion by Charles Webster. Webster was a British historian and civil servant involved in drafting the Charter in San Francisco. He stated that the United Nations was ‘an Alliance of the Great Pow- ers embedded in a universal organisation’. Its key achievement in Webster’s eyes was not to secure ‘better standards of life in larger freedom’ but the diplomatic function ‘to have improved the machinery governing relations between the powers.’4 Webster’s remarks reveal a tension at the heart of the United Nations in 1945 which needs to be considered when making contemporary judgements about the organisation we see before our eyes.
Furthermore, the United Nations story begins before San Fran- cisco in 1945, so a further level of context helps in that judgement. The United Nations came into existence on 01 January 1942 when twenty six nations signed the ‘United Nations Declaration’ with the goal of upholding the Atlantic Charter and collectively
1 http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/preamble.shtml accessed April 2011.
2 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace – The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, (Princeton University Press, 2008) p.9.
3 Mazower, p.7.
4 Quoted in Mazower, p. 8
defeating the Axis powers. Dan Plesch’s recent work, America, Hitler and the UN: How the Allies Won World War II and Forged a Peace, insightfully points out the extent of United Nations activity during the war that went into victory.5 From Reconstruc- tion through the ‘United Nations Recovery and Reconstruction Administration’ (UNRRA) which spent over $4 billion between 1943 and 1949; and Economic regulation through the estab- lishment of the Bretton Woods system, the United Nations long before San Francisco was simultaneously managing war-fighting and peace-making agendas.
Equally important to understanding the deliberations in San Fran- cisco was that those gathered had seen the fate of a previous International Organisation. The failings of the League of Nations need not be recounted here yet, like the ‘funny uncle’ that figured in so many Victorian novellas, the League of Nation’s heritage in the United Nations is avoided. Yet the cast of characters who contributed to both is compelling: Jan Smuts who has already been mentioned, is again a leading example. The South African was an important sounding board to US President Woodrow Wilson at Versailles and a compelling figure amongst delegates in San Francisco. Others at all levels of international politics – including Roosevelt and Churchill – took with them ‘lessons learned’ from their League experiences to the emerging United Nations after 1942. The legacy that emerged from Versailles with the League of Nations as its centrepiece is one that was over- looked as the infantile United Nations was so quickly coloured by the emerging Cold War, but the inheritance was there. Writ- ing not long after the Second World War had begun one British Foreign Office official recalled of Versailles as he pondered the outcome of the War: ‘I hope that we shall be less severe and wiser in many respects than at Versailles, but more severe and wiser in others.’6 This was the challenge for those of the United Nations during the Second World War. That they were able to address it in a meaningful fashion at all while facing down the Axis gives meaning to words of Franklin Roosevelt’s speech for Jefferson Day in April 1945. Undelivered due to his passing: “the work, my friends, is peace; more than an end of this war—an end to the beginning of all wars; as we go forward toward the greatest contribution that any generation of human beings can make in this world—the contribution of lasting peace—I ask you to keep up your faith....”
In conclusion, it should be no surprise when looking at the United Nations Organisation today that we fail to see a wholly joined up body: it has tension over its purposes and its means built in from the start. Of course, to most people around the world the ‘UN’ is much more than the subject of an academic debate or the Secu- rity Council Resolutions we see emerging from New York, and that is without mentioning the broad family of organisations that live within the common United Nations ‘home’. Debates about the United Nations should remind us how the past – for good or ill – influences contemporary political decision making.
Dr J Simon Rofe is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leicester. His specialism is the field of US Dimplomatic and Foreign Relations in the 20th Century.
5 6
Dan Plesch, America, Hitler and the UN, (I B Tauris, 2010).
J Simon Rofe, Franklin Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy and the Welles Mission, Palgrave, 2007
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