United Nations begins

Identification International organization of member nations whose goals are world peace, international security, global economic development, social progress, and human rights

Date Charter ratified on October 24, 1945

Since its creation shortly after the end of World War II, the world’s only globally representative international organization has worked to prevent new world wars by bringing nations together to resolve their differences peacefully. It has not achieved all its goals but has been a forum for diplomacy and for mediating and containing conflicts.

The idea of creating an international organization capable of controlling armed conflict dates back from at least the time of the Achaean League of the late fifth century b.c.e. Consequently, the immediate predecessor of the modern United Nations (U.N.), the League of Nations, which was created after World War I, was to the U.N. founders only the most recent and elaborate attempt to attain world peace. However, like its historical predecessors, the league failed in its endeavors, and the terrible costs of World War II in money, resources, and human lives made it clear that a more effective instrument for peacekeeping was needed. It is in the events during World War II, particularly in the diplomatic decisions reached by the war’s eventual victors, that both the immediate origins of the United Nations and the choices that eventually handicapped its efforts to keep the peace are to be found.

Planning the United Nations

The first attempt to create an international peacekeeping body occurred during formulation of the London Declaration of June 12, 1941, in which spokesmen for the countries then fighting against Nazi Germany announced their intentions to work with other free nations after the war to create a world without armed conflict. This sentiment was echoed in the Atlantic Charter of August, 1941, and expanded the following January, when representatives of twenty-six nations met in Washington, D.C., and adopted the Declaration of United Nations, in which the nations committed themselves to the creation of “a wider and permanent system of general security ” after the war. The focus of that session, however, was on winning the war, and although the term “united nations” emerged in that gathering, and is credited to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the term was clearly made in reference to those fighting against their common enemy, not as a suggestion for the name of a postwar international organization.

The shaping of such an international body began at the Moscow Conference in October, 1943, during which efforts to rebuild the League of Nations were abandoned. In its place, representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China agreed in the Declaration of the Four Nations on General Security to establish, at the earliest practical date, a new international organization “for the maintenance of international peace and security” based on the principle of sovereign equality and open to all peace-loving states.

At the Tehran Conference of November 28-December 1, 1943, the “Big Three”—Roosevelt, British prime ministerWinston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin—formally decided to create a new international body following the war. At the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which convened in Washington, D.C., on August 21, 1944, delegates discussed the broad framework for the new agency. Representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China decided that the organization would have both a General Assembly representing all member states—as had been a feature of the League of Nations—and an Executive Council charged with maintaining security, which was a part of the league. The sensitive issue of the voting system for this executive council was left to the decision of the Big Three, who were already scheduled to meet at Yalta in February, 1945.

Yalta was the last meeting of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. There, the principle of “great power unanimity” was accepted as the basis for making the Executive Council’s security-related decisions. In addition, the troublesome issue of how many of the Soviet Union’s supposedly autonomous republics would hold seats in the General Assembly was resolved when Stalin agreed to separate representation for only Ukraine and Belorussia. The remainder of the details and the initial drafting of the Charter of the United Nations was then left to the delegates scheduled to convene in San Francisco on April 25, 1945. China and France were also invited to attend as sponsoring governments.

Improving on the League of Nations

At its core, the United Nations was designed to be an effective instrument of collective security capable of deterring war by confronting member states bent on aggression with the collective response of the international community. As such, it was meant to be a second-generation improvement over the League of Nations, which President Woodrow Wilson had proposed after World War I. The U.N. founders made a studied effort to correct the defects that were widely believed to have caused the league’s failure.

To most of the its critics, the primary weakness of the League of Nations had been its lack of an effective enforcement mechanism. It could only recommend that member states apply economic sanctions against aggressor states. Consequently, the compliance of member states was often weak or nonexistent. Moreover, even if members had complied wholeheartedly with league recommendations, there was little reason to believe that the threat of economic sanctions would have dissuaded Japan, Germany, or Italy from pursuing the aggressive agendas that led to World War II. Hence, it was not the U.N. General Assembly that would become the heart of the United Nations but its Security Council, which had no parallel in the league. Under the U.N. charter, the Security Council not only has the power to authorize U.N. members to militarily enforce its resolutions but also can create an international military force under its own command.

In the opinion of the U.N. founders, the League of Nations was also weakened by not having as members certain nations—most notably the United States and the Soviet Union—that played significant roles in international relations. Collective security organizations are intended to be inward-looking structures with universal membership, enforcing their mandates to maintain the peace on their member states. The League of Nations was never able to do this because some nations either failed to join or dropped out at crucial moments. The creators of the United Nations wanted to avoid this situation and were willing to pay a high price to do so. To assure their participation, the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China were given permanent seats on the Security Council and the power to veto council actions that they perceived as threats to their national interests. The hope was that these countries’ wartime alliance would continue in the postwar world. However, the logic here was clear: There would be no reason for these states to stay out of the United Nations and risk it being used against them when, by joining, they could prevent this from happening.

The structure of the League of Nations also failed to account adequately for the link between economic and social conditions and warfare. In a sense, the league was backward-looking, diagnosing World War I as the man-made product of poor leadership and the implementation of secret treaties of mutual assistance. Open diplomacy in the league’s assembly was meant to counter that threat, but the league had no response to the effects of the Great Depression on world populations, some of which were willing to turn to radical leaders, like Adolf Hitler, to save them when unemployment rates soared into the 60 percent range. With this in mind, the architects of the United Nations created a permanent Economic and Social Council charged with the tasks of monitoring and easing socioeconomic conditions likely to lead to conflict and of calling the Security Council’s attention to such conditions.

Finally, the league was seen as fatally flawed because of its identity with the outcome of World War I, and a significant effort was made to divorce the creation of the United Nations from the outcome of World War II. The league’s constitution was a part of the Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended World War I, and the losers of that war were required to join the organization. Consequently, states like Germany had little reason to view their membership as a legitimate product of their free will. The founders of the United Nations were determined not to repeat this error, which is perhaps the best explanation for why the Charter of the United Nations lacked any back-up plan for effective action should the Security Council become paralyzed by vetoes, because when the San Francisco conference was scheduled, it was believed that the end of the war, at least in the Pacific, was still years in the future.

To the contrary, by the time delegates from fifty countries gathered in San Francisco on April 25, 1945, the Soviet army had already reached Berlin, and the war in Europe was all but over; it would officially end on May 8. Moreover, the United States believed it already had the capacity to construct an atomic bomb, which would quickly force Japan to accept unconditional surrender, as it did on August 14, five days after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. In these rapidly changing circumstances, the delegates had to work hard to get a final draft of the charter completed on a less leisurely timetable, and the charter probably failed to contain all of the details needed to create the new organization.

Impact

Less than two years after the ratification of the Charter of the United Nations in October, 1945, the wartime collaboration of the United States and the Soviet Union against the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy in World War II had evolved into a Cold War, in which U.S. foreign policy was increasingly devoted to containing further Soviet expansion. One of the first political casualties of this war was the Security Council’s ability to respond effectively to many conflicts because of the competing interests of these two superpowers.

It was thus not until the end of the Cold War, and more than forty years after the founding of the United Nations, that the Security Council was able to undertake its first enforcement action; in the late summer of 1990, the United Nations authorized the use of a multinational military force under the command of a United States general to enforce United Nations resolutions demanding the withdrawal of the Iraqi army that had occupied neighboring Kuwait . However, long before that time, the United Nations had become a useful instrument in other areas of the world, where it managed conflict under the guiding hands of a series of U.N. secretary generals, who negotiated cease-fire agreements between warring parties and organized small peacekeeping forces to patrol cease-fire zones and otherwise help maintain a fragile peace. Similarly, political conflicts have often been conducted in a war of words in the Security Council or General Assembly rather than a conflict of arms on a distant battlefield, providing innumerable justifications for the existence of the United Nations, even if it has yet to become the collective security organization its founders envisioned in 1945.

Bibliography

Forsythe, David P., and Roger A. Coat. The United Nations and Changing World Politics. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001. Excellent for follow-up research on the United Nations as an instrument of collective security.

Meisler, Stanley. United Nations: The First Fifty Years. Eagan, Minn.: West, 1997. A useful survey analysis of the principal U.N. accomplishments and pitfalls in living up to the mandate of its charter during its first half century of existence.

Mingst, Karen A., and Margaret P. Karns. The United Nations in the Twenty-first Century. 3d ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2007. Highly recommended introductory reading on both the birth, evolution, and performance of the United Nations, measured against the visions of its creators.

Thakur, Ramesh. The United Nations: Peace and Security from Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Good for advanced research on how the United Nations has actually functioned since its creation as a collective security organization. Includes an excellent analysis of the current body’s need for reform and of the obstacles deterring this process.

United States Delegation to the United Nations Conference on International Organization, San Francisco, 1945. Charter of the United Nations: Report to the President on the Results of the San Francisco Conference by the Chairman of the United States Delegation, the Secretary of State. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1945. The official U.S. government report on the San Francisco Conference, generally available in university research libraries.

United States Department of State. The United Nations Conference on International Organization, San Francisco, California, April 25 to June 26, 1945. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946. The most readily available and perhaps the most voluminous collection of documents and speeches published at the time the United Nations was created.