Conclusion: past as prelude, whither the United Nations?

10 Conclusion


Past as prelude, whither the United Nations?


Dan Plesch and Thomas G. Weiss



The rediscovery of the lost or the suppressed is a recurring theme in literature, mythology, and of course history: the Renaissance itself is a defining example. Much of Western popular fiction since World War II—from The Lord of the Rings to The Chronicles of Narnia to Star Wars—is based on such rediscovery. Our conclusion to this volume is that revisiting the practice of the United Nations at war provides a startling example of the phenomenon of forgotten historical lessons.


In 1945, one London synagogue marked the end of World War II with a service celebrating “The Victory in Arms of the United Nations,” and comparable labeling was also used in Christian services. Seven decades later, this packaging seems so odd as to require fact checking.1 Yet this United Nations had not only defeated fascism but had also been building multilateral civilian organizations since 1942. As such, international cooperation for economic and social policies was at the core of Allied national security strategy for the postwar world; the current equivalents of “human security” or “human development” are, in contrast, found on the periphery. The legacy of Allied efforts from 1942 to 1945 merits careful scrutiny as the planet collectively continues to fumble with problem solving in the anarchical world of the twenty-first century.


Rather than try to spell out separate insights from individual chapters, we instead explore the implications arising across the essays about the wartime origins of United Nations and the future of the world organization. Six stand out with implications with a bearing on practice or scholarship: the decision to work multilaterally; the broad substantive and geographic resonance of multilateralism; the relevance of historical inquiry to understanding the contemporary globalizing world; further research for the lines of inquiry sketched here; the implications for theoretical explorations of international affairs; and the underappreciated role of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) in global governance.


Multilateral cooperation, realism not idealism


The national decisions to work together, and to make the subsequent construction of peace a core part of the original mobilization against fascism, reflect a Realist (or at least realistic) calculation about the merits of multilateral cooperation. To revisit the title of our Introduction, cooperation was a short-term tactic designed to have a synergistic relationship with a more comprehensive, longer-run strategy. The “vision-thing” motivated peoples and kept states allied, and it was made tangible so that the postwar vision was more than propaganda and sought to get as much accomplished as possible before “business-as-usual” returned as the default option for the postwar world order.


Governments pursued traditional vital interests, to be sure, but the wartime United Nations was far more than a temporary and idealistic packaging, a liberal plaything to be tossed aside as soon as the war ended. The Cold War halted this basic multilateral commitment and spawned a far narrower cooperation confined to states within two competing ideological blocs. It is hard not to pose the counterfactual about the shape of contemporary global problem solving had wartime collaboration endured beyond the bloodshed.


None of the chapters here supports the notion that the failed League of Nations made either governments or analysts view as sensible and logical any recommendation for states to rely on might alone after the second war in two decades to end all wars. If that were indeed the case, Allied governments might have insisted on Spartan educational methods to prepare their populations for the next war; reciprocal mass atrocities perpetrated against the Germans; US corporate takeovers of potentially profitable European economies and their empires; and Moscow bombed by a Realist United States as an encore after Nagasaki. While national competition and interest, as always, remained a feature of international politics, something fundamental had changed.


That such traditional solutions and quid-pro-quos did not occur should be puzzling; to win and yet not seek revenge and plant the seeds for the next war was not an approach much in evidence in Western history save in limited form after 1815, but the post-World War II peace was not based on a Metternich-like management of nationalisms but on cooperation among rivals. As the historian Angus Lockyer observed, education in the West, for instance, had been oriented toward training men for war for 500 years.2 What changed so that the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education during the war sought insights about healing the wounds of war rather than rubbing salt in them?


What changed was the self-destructive mindset of World War I. The 1914–18 bloodletting had such a dreadful impact on so many societies that a widespread revulsion arose against its repetition. That the next war came about driven by even more extreme racist militarism made the attacked governments and peoples more rather than less determined to do better the next time around. In 1948 the commissioners from the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) wrote in their final report:



One side, that of the Axis, asserted the absolute responsibility of belligerents, who, it was asserted, were under no obligation to respect human rights, but were entitled to trample them underfoot wherever the military forces found them inconvenient for the waging of war. This is the totalitarian war as envisaged by the Axis powers. This doctrine was repudiated as contrary not only to morality but to recognized international law which prescribed metes and bounds for the violation even in war of human rights.3


While historians tend to emphasize continuity and political scientists change, these essays contain evidence of both. Each chapter in this volume builds not only on learning from the 1942–45 period but also aims to salvage the viable components from the general wreckage of the League of Nations as part of the foundations for the next generation of international organizations. The efforts to pursue economic and social research, to care for refugees, to pursue human rights, and to charge international secretariats with responsibilities for action were all present in the wartime thinking and practice of the 1940s. To meet these ends, the toxic brand that the League had become was disavowed, but its staff and methods were much in demand as officials sought to avoid an endless repetition of wars of increasing self-destructiveness.


The British and other Europeans were motivated to follow almost any American lead that would—in contrast to the collapsed League of Nations without Washington’s participation—involve the United States in the wider world to help in the future control of Germany, Japan, and, for some, the Soviet Union. However, on war crimes, education, agriculture, and the global economy, European ideas joined those of Australian, Chinese, and Indian officials to shape outcomes.


As at present and for much of the period since its establishment, national policymakers—and certainly those in Washington—have seen little need to invest more political capital in the United Nations although more has been devoted to regional organizations. A fresh look at the effectiveness of and the strong investment in liberal internationalism in order to win World War II could elevate that earlier strategy as a benchmark in comparison with contemporary efforts that deride universal membership organizations.


Since World War II’s end, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s multilateral strategy was set aside in favor of Harry S. Truman’s visceral anticommunism, the United States has not replicated its success. In sporting terms, the “wins” in the 1991 Gulf War and in the Balkans can be set against the “tie” in Korea, and the major losses in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Who or what led to the collapse of communism and whether the Cold War itself and its duration were necessary is still being discussed by the umpires. The impact of Roosevelt’s progressive era strategy, while hotly derided by self-styled Realists, looks remarkable in retrospect.


The wide relevance of multilateralism


Both the substance of wartime efforts and their geographical reach go far beyond the simple morality tale of a military triumph, usually told as an American or Anglo-American story that has arguably become the defining experience of the contemporary world order. Yet the multilateral values of the time as captured in this volume’s essays were quickly set aside and, indeed, forgotten in order to emphasize national contributions. As state leaders and publics alike contemplate the problems of the twenty-first century, the striking 1942–45 investments of political, human, and financial capital in projects and programs that recognized the overlap between global and national interests should be revisited. They provide inspiration, if not templates, for contemporary practice.


Moreover, additional lessons arise from the resonance of such an approach worldwide, among states and non-states alike. Contributors to this volume, like a growing number of historians everywhere, share a wider perspective and accompanying conviction: the history of the UN’s wartime origins, like the history of any epoch, cannot be understood merely in terms of separate national or even regional histories but should encompass the global context of that moment. As a result, the customary tale of the victory over the Axis powers in World War II being told as an Anglo-American story—with the substantial addition of the Soviet Union’s contributions on the Eastern front and an occasional mention of China—should be modified.


As the deliberations took place before the rapid decolonization that followed the war—only 50 states participated in the San Francisco Conference on International Organization whereas today’s UN membership numbers 193—it is tempting to simplify the tale. Here, however, the details of Imperial India’s and China’s contributions to early efforts to pursue war criminals and determine the postwar direction of assistance to forcibly displaced persons and of trade and finance, for instance, are pertinent. Clearly more powerful countries, and especially the United States, had more say during such deliberations, but other voices from countries in what is now called the “global South” were actually present on stage and not merely in the wings, including not only 19 states from Latin America that had long been independent but also others whose independence was more recent: three from Africa (Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa); three from Asia (China, the Philippines, and Imperial India); and seven from the Middle East (Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey). By the 1970s, of course, decolonization had proceeded apace and two-thirds of UN members would be erstwhile colonies, but the wartime and immediate postwar United Nations was already far more than a Western history even a generation before decolonization was completed. Indeed, rapid decolonization is hard to imagine in the form and with the speed that it took place without these earlier developments.


Twenty-first-century leadership discourse in China and India and elsewhere among emerging powers finds it convenient to accept the Anglo-American mythology—if only as a justification for distancing themselves from the “old order” and the 1945 institutions. A clear appreciation of their own liberation efforts in the context of the wartime deliberations would provide the basis for a new internationalist—dare we say, even a “post-national”—approach to global affairs more suited to contemporary needs and problem solving.


Non-state actors of all stripes sought to shape the postwar institutions—independent commissions studying the lessons of the past for future application, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) delivering aid or lobbying, and other civil society actors, including the media and business, were involved in the fray. We are hardly the first to remark that the world is more interconnected and interdependent than it used to be. However, the wartime experience already suggested the increased ease of establishing international entities and coalitions of all stripes, and in multiplying their interactions and impact. This reality represented an intensification of the variable geometry of what is now called “transnational relations” or “global governance” before the term was coined in the 1990s, although analysts certainly see evidence earlier.4 Over the past century, there has been a marked increase in the number and the scope of actors on the world stage, and their burgeoning numbers have been concentrated in non-state actors—specifically in international NGOs and transnational corporations (TNCs).


In doing so, states and non-state actors have cobbled together frameworks for cooperation and actual responses that have produced more order, stability, predictability, and respect for human rights than might have been expected. In short, they have contributed to improving global governance, which goes far beyond a formal system of coordination by state-based entities to embrace an evolving system of multi-sector partnerships. While states are the starting point for analyses of world politics, they are no longer alone in the limelight on the globe’s stage, and this situation was already in evidence during and immediately after World War II. The growth of non-state actors has meant more diversity in potential players and partners. The proliferation of actors has continued and is contributing concretely to the shape of contemporary global problem solving.


In short, even in the ultimate world conflagration between states, the state-centric model of traditional international relations failed to capture accurately the international dynamics at play. And more than Western values and notions were on the drawing board and ultimately in the United Nations Charter.


Historical grounding for today’s global governance


Going back to the World War II origins of the United Nations is enough to make most social scientists’ eyes glaze over—fortunately not those of the contributors to this volume.5 In addition to the blinkered focus on the present that we lament in the Introduction, another obstacle to better understanding is that mainstream international relations has shifted away from the study of intergovernmental organization and law, toward “global governance.”6 The term itself was born from a marriage between academic theory and practical policy in the 1990s and became entwined with that other meta-phenomenon of the last two decades, globalization. James Rosenau and Ernst Czempiel’s theoretical Governance without Government was published in 1992,7 just about the same time that the Swedish government launched the policy-oriented Commission on Global Governance under the chairmanship of Sonny Ramphal and Ingmar Carlsson. Both set in motion interest in global governance. The 1995 publication of the commission’s report, Our Global Neighbourhood,8 coincided with the first issue of the Academic Council on the United Nations system’s journal Global Governance. This quarterly sought to return to the global problem-solving origins of the leading journal in the field, which seemed to have lost its way. “From the late 1960s, the idea of international organization fell into disuse,” Timothy Sinclair reminds us. “International Organization, the journal which carried this name founded in the 1940s, increasingly drew back from matters of international policy and instead became a vehicle for the development of rigorous academic theorizing.”9


Employing the term did not, however, eliminate the preoccupations that had motivated previous generations of international relations and international organization scholars because global governance still sought to explore collective efforts to identify, understand, and address worldwide problems and processes that went beyond the capacities of individual states. It reflected a capacity of the international system at any moment in time to provide government-like services in the absence of world government. Global governance encompassed cooperative problem-solving arrangements that were visible but informal (e.g., practices or guidelines) or were temporary formations (e.g., coalitions of the willing). Such arrangements could also be more formal, taking the shape of hard rules (laws and treaties) or else institutions with administrative structures and established practices to manage collective affairs by a variety of actors—including state authorities, intergovernmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, private sector entities, and other civil society actors.


Perhaps most importantly, the United Nations has been and continues to be an important player in filling some global governance gaps.10 In fact, the essays in this collection suggest the extent to which the wartime United Nations also played this role before the United Nations Organization was born in San Francisco.

Only gold members can continue reading. Log In or Register to continue