[October 24th
will mark the 75th anniversary of the official establishment of the
United Nations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories connected to
the UN, leading up to a weekend post on global interconnectedness in 2020.]
On why it’s
important, and challenging, to remember the UN’s wartime origins.
I imagine just
about everybody with a sense of history understands that the United Nations was
created in the immediate aftermath of, and thus directly due to, World War II.
Yet far less well known, I would argue, are the UN’s earlier origin points, the
two crucial wartime moments that produced this next international organization.
Both followed almost immediately upon the US’s official entrance into the war:
in late December 1941, President
Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill worked
together to draft a “Declaration by United Nations”; and just a short time
later, on New Year’s Day 1942, Roosevelt, Churchill, and the leaders of the
USSR and China signed what came to be known as the United Nations
Declaration, with representatives from 22 other world leaders adding their
signatures in the days that followed. While the organization would not be
formally established until the war’s end, it was these wartime moments that set
the process in motion.
While of course
it’s important to remember these histories accurately for their own sake, doing
so also helps us differentiate the origins of the United Nations from those of
the League of Nations (about which I wrote in yesterday’s post) in two meaningful
ways. First, while the League was formed as part of a contentious peace
process, and thus seemed to some observers to be punishing particular nations
and rewarding others based on the Great War’s enmities and outcomes, the idea
for the United Nations originated in the horrors and exigencies of war; indeed,
that initial 1942 UN Declaration overtly prohibited signatories from making
their own peace and bound these global allies together. Which is to say, while
the League’s creation arguably and ironically amplified international divisions
and separations, the UN’s Declaration responded to existing such divisions
(reflected in an ongoing war) by constructing instead a vision of global unity
and shared effort. The new organization’s name itself exemplified that emphasis
on global unity, on a mutual recognition of the interdependence that bound
together even seemingly opposed nations such as the US and the USSR.
At the same
time, there was an irony within this wartime origin point for the UN. That is,
not only was the new organization not overtly framed (as had been the League)
as seeking to achieve to international peace, but in fact a prominent element
of the 1942 Declaration was the signatories’ pledge to put forth “maximum war
effort.” That may have been an understandable and necessary element in the heat
of World War II, but as the UN has transitioned into its full postwar existence
and mission, and especially into the emphases on global peacekeeping about
which I’ll write more later in the week, the challenge of wedding that mission
to the organization’s origins has persisted. To cite one prominent component of
that challenge, the five permanent members
of the UN’s Security Council (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US)
are drawn directly from those nations that signed the 1942 Declaration (along
with France, which was occupied at the time but closely tied to the UK in its
resistance to the Nazis), and quite purposefully do not include any of the
war’s Axis nations (Germany, Italy, Japan). That choice does not necessarily
lead to any particular actions or outcomes, but it certainly reflects the
complex legacies of the UN’s wartime origins into its ongoing existence and
identity, legacies we can better consider if we remember when and why the UN
was created.
Next UN history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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