How to Revive the UN? Look Backwards
Mr. Roberts is a professor of history at University College Cork, Ireland, and a writer for the History News Service.
The United Nations' 60th-anniversary celebrations have been overshadowed by controversy about the organization's future. The most contentious issue is whether Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States should retain their veto power in the Security Council. Under the UN Charter any one of these five permanent members has the power to veto any decision or action that it disagrees with.
There's no chance that the Big Five will give up the veto or that they'll agree to extend this privilege to states such as Germany, Japan, India and Brazil. Such a move would paralyze decision-making and turn the UN into a new version of the discredited League of Nations, which failed to take effective action in the face of German, Italian and Japanese aggression in the 1930s.
In fact, what the UN needs to do is to return to its roots and strengthen rather than dilute the powers and role of the permanent members of the Security Council.
When it was established in 1945,the UN was an organization of the victor states of World War II. Its foundations rested on the wartime Grand Alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. Indeed, the UN's name was derived from the"Declaration by United Nations," signed in Washington in January 1942, which set out the war and peace aims of the Grand Alliance.
Discussions within the Grand Alliance about the creation of a new global security organization began in 1942 when President Roosevelt proposed that the Great Powers should constitute themselves as international policemen and use their combined military forces to impose order on world affairs.
This idea of a proactive policing of the postwar world was enthusiastically taken up by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who insisted that such an arrangement would only work if the Big Three maintained their unity. The organizational expression of that unity -- the veto system -- meant the Great Powers could not use the UN against each other nor could they take collective security action except on the basis of consent.
The UN was founded at a conference of fifty allied nations in San Francisco in June 1945, but all the important decisions about the structure and role of the new organization had already been taken by the Big Three. The Charter had been drafted at an American-British-Soviet conference at Dumbarton Oaks in August 1944. In February 1945, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt agreed on the veto system.
The Big Three decided which states would be invited to become UN founding members. Included were those states that had fought on the allied side during the war; excluded were not only all enemy states, but neutrals such as Ireland, Sweden, Portugal and Spain. France and China became permanent members of the Security Council at the behest of the Big Three.
In San Francisco numerous complaints about the"great powerism" of the Big Three were aired and demands made for the establishment of a more egalitarian organization. Many of these complaints came from states such as Australia and Canada that had played a significant role in the allied war effort. But the stark reality was that without the Big Three there would be no UN and that meant accepting a mechanism -- the veto -- to enable the Great Powers to protect their individual and collective interests.
When, not long after the end of the World War II, the Grand Alliance collapsed, the UN became a battleground of the Soviet-Western Cold War. In that context the UN was unable to function as it was originally intended, as a framework for the Great Powers to pool their military resources and agree on action against aggressive states. Instead, various lobbies within the UN began to emphasize the organization's universalistic character and its role as the protector of the rights of states and their citizens.
Embodied in this reinvention of the UN as the precursor of a new, morally superior international order was a rewriting of history that glossed over its wartime origins in great-power politics.
The UN is a now a very different organization from that founded by the Big Three. It has many more members, is more diverse and is deeply involved in the world's economic, social, cultural and educational affairs as well as with security issues. But the UN's core identity is still defined by the co-operation and conflict of the Great Powers within the Security Council.
When Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin decided to establish the UN they saw clearly that it could only be as effective as the collective will of its most important and militarily powerful members. They aimed to use the UN to protect their own countries' interests but also to create a global order that would mean peace and security for all states.
Sixty years later there is a lot to be said in favor of their brand of great powerism. Now that the Cold War is long over it's time to return to their realistic vision of the conditions necessary for the UN to make an effective contribution to world peace and security.
There's no chance that the Big Five will give up the veto or that they'll agree to extend this privilege to states such as Germany, Japan, India and Brazil. Such a move would paralyze decision-making and turn the UN into a new version of the discredited League of Nations, which failed to take effective action in the face of German, Italian and Japanese aggression in the 1930s.
In fact, what the UN needs to do is to return to its roots and strengthen rather than dilute the powers and role of the permanent members of the Security Council.
When it was established in 1945,the UN was an organization of the victor states of World War II. Its foundations rested on the wartime Grand Alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. Indeed, the UN's name was derived from the"Declaration by United Nations," signed in Washington in January 1942, which set out the war and peace aims of the Grand Alliance.
Discussions within the Grand Alliance about the creation of a new global security organization began in 1942 when President Roosevelt proposed that the Great Powers should constitute themselves as international policemen and use their combined military forces to impose order on world affairs.
This idea of a proactive policing of the postwar world was enthusiastically taken up by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who insisted that such an arrangement would only work if the Big Three maintained their unity. The organizational expression of that unity -- the veto system -- meant the Great Powers could not use the UN against each other nor could they take collective security action except on the basis of consent.
The UN was founded at a conference of fifty allied nations in San Francisco in June 1945, but all the important decisions about the structure and role of the new organization had already been taken by the Big Three. The Charter had been drafted at an American-British-Soviet conference at Dumbarton Oaks in August 1944. In February 1945, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt agreed on the veto system.
The Big Three decided which states would be invited to become UN founding members. Included were those states that had fought on the allied side during the war; excluded were not only all enemy states, but neutrals such as Ireland, Sweden, Portugal and Spain. France and China became permanent members of the Security Council at the behest of the Big Three.
In San Francisco numerous complaints about the"great powerism" of the Big Three were aired and demands made for the establishment of a more egalitarian organization. Many of these complaints came from states such as Australia and Canada that had played a significant role in the allied war effort. But the stark reality was that without the Big Three there would be no UN and that meant accepting a mechanism -- the veto -- to enable the Great Powers to protect their individual and collective interests.
When, not long after the end of the World War II, the Grand Alliance collapsed, the UN became a battleground of the Soviet-Western Cold War. In that context the UN was unable to function as it was originally intended, as a framework for the Great Powers to pool their military resources and agree on action against aggressive states. Instead, various lobbies within the UN began to emphasize the organization's universalistic character and its role as the protector of the rights of states and their citizens.
Embodied in this reinvention of the UN as the precursor of a new, morally superior international order was a rewriting of history that glossed over its wartime origins in great-power politics.
The UN is a now a very different organization from that founded by the Big Three. It has many more members, is more diverse and is deeply involved in the world's economic, social, cultural and educational affairs as well as with security issues. But the UN's core identity is still defined by the co-operation and conflict of the Great Powers within the Security Council.
When Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin decided to establish the UN they saw clearly that it could only be as effective as the collective will of its most important and militarily powerful members. They aimed to use the UN to protect their own countries' interests but also to create a global order that would mean peace and security for all states.
Sixty years later there is a lot to be said in favor of their brand of great powerism. Now that the Cold War is long over it's time to return to their realistic vision of the conditions necessary for the UN to make an effective contribution to world peace and security.
This piece was distributed for non-exclusive use by the History News Service, an informal syndicate of professional historians who seek to improve the public's understanding of current events by setting these events in their historical contexts. The article may be republished as long as both the author and the History News Service are clearly credited.