An essay in universal history

10. THE UNITED NATIONS

World War Two destroyed more lives and property than any conflict in history. This fact convinced many that the only way to have peace on earth was to create a supra-national government that would restrain national rivalries and impose its will on aggressive states. Such an ideal goes back at least to Dante’s De Monarchia in the early fourteenth century. However, the origin of its modern, secular expression must be sought in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), which contained the following axiom: "The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states".¹¹⁹

The first attempt at incarnating such a federation was the Congress System erected by Tsar Alexander I and the monarchs of Prussia and Austria after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. This came to a bloody end during the Crimean War of 1854-56. The idea was revived in a limited form by Tsar Nicholas II when he founded the International Court of Arbitration at The Hague in 1899. This Court had very little practical impact and did not prevent the outbreak of World War One in 1914. However, the unparalleled destruction wrought by the war that was supposed to end all wars forced the politicians to think again…
“The first outline of the United Nations,” writes S.M. Plokhy, “was drafted by Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles on the basis of the covenant of the League of Nations. A creation of the Paris Peace Conference [of 1919], the League convened its first general assembly in Geneva in November 1920 and its last in April 1946, when representatives of its member nations voted to dissolve it. The League’s activities had in fact come to a virtual halt in 1939, the first year of the war that it had failed to prevent and for whose outbreak it was universally blamed. The problem was that the League could neither adopt nor enforce its decisions: all resolutions had to be passed with the unanimous approval of its council, an executive body that included great powers as permanent members and smaller powers as temporary ones, as well as its assembly. The principle of unanimity was enshrined in the League’s covenant, whose fifth chapter stated that ‘decisions at any meeting of the Assembly or of the Council shall require the agreement of all the Members of the League represented at the meeting.’ This was virtually impossible to achieve, especially when matters under discussion involved the great powers.
“The United States did not join the League. Woodrow Wilson received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 for his role in its creation, but he failed to overcome Republican opposition and persuade an increasingly isolationist Congress to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which would have led to American membership in the League. The American drafters of the United Nations Charter were mindful of the inevitable opposition that any international organization whose decisions would be binding on the United States would encounter in Congress. They also had to overcome a baleful precedent – the League’s inability to influence the conduct of Germany and Japan after their departure from the organization in 1933. Italy would follow suit in 1937. The formation of the Axis by these three countries in 1940 met with no effective response.
“If the new organization was to do better, it would have to learn from its predecessor’s mistakes. The drafters of its charter had the daunting task of reconciling what struck many as irreconcilable. Since August 1943, the principal drafter of the document at the State Department had been Leo Pasvolsky, the head of the department’s Informal Agenda Group and Hull’s former personal assistant. A fifty-year-old Jewish émigré from Ukraine, Pasvolsky was no stranger to the subject of international peace organizations. Back in 1919 he had covered the Paris Peace Conference for the New York Tribune, and later he had campaigned for the admission of the Soviet Union, whose brand of socialism he rejected, to the League of Nations.
“Pasvolsky’s appointment as principal drafter of the charter was a testament of the triumph of Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s vision over an alternative model championed by Sumner Welles. Hull favoured a centralized structure, while Welles wanted the great powers to bear primary responsibility for security in their respective regions. Welles’s model followed FDR’s thinking of the role of the ‘four policemen’ – the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, China – in the postwar peace arrangement. By the fall of 1943, with Welles resigning in the midst of a homosexual scandal, Roosevelt had opted for the centralized model. FDR’s decision was guided by the fact that his ‘four policement’ would be permanent members of the UN Security Council…”¹²⁰
After much argument with both the Russians and the British, Roosevelt finally achieved his principal goal at Yalta, the founding of the United Nations. He had been forced to concede to the Soviets that Ukraine and Belorussia should have seats in the General Assembly alongside Soviet Russia, which violated the principle that only sovereign states should sit there. But he more or less got his way with the most important of the six major organs of the United Nations, the Security Council. It was composed of fifteen members with five permanent members - the Big Three, China and France, - any of which could veto decisions of the Security Council, although unanimous decisions of the “Big Five” were deemed to be binding on other members. In this way Victors’ Justice continued to operate in the adjudication of international disputes in the post-war era.
The Security Council convened for the first time on January 17, 1946. However, in the atmosphere of the Cold War that developed very soon thereafter (Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech was delivered on March 5, 1946), it showed its virtual impotence to achieve justice and peace when the interests of one of the Great Powers was affected. The old politics continued; the world was divided into two vast spheres of influence, the Communist East and the Capitalist West; and with the explosion of two atomic bombs over Japan in the summer of 1945 the very real prospect beckoned of world war between the two blocs leading to the annihilation of mankind. Never before in the history of mankind had it been so urgently necessary to find a solution to the problems of international relations, peace and justice. But clearly the plan of locking the most evil power in history into a quasi-world government in which it had the power of veto not only did not solve the problem, but made the task of taming and neutralizing that power far more difficult...
This potential strangle-hold exerted over the United Nations by the Soviets was revealed right as early as May, 1945, when the foreign ministers of the victor powers gathered in San Francisco to establish the organization’s ground rules. Molotov, as Martin Gilbert writes, “told his American and British opposite numbers – Edward Stettinius and Anthony Eden – that sixteen members of the all-Party Polish Government in Warsaw, who had gone to Moscow at the request of the American and British governments to negotiate a peace treaty, were all in prison. In the Daily Herald a future leader of the British Labour Party, Michael Foot, who was in San Francisco as a journalist, described the impact on the conference of Molotov’s announcement. The distressing news, wrote Foot, came ‘almost casually’ towards the end of an otherwise cordial dinner, Molotov ‘could hardly have cause a greater sensation if he had upset the whole table and thrown the soup in Mr. Stettinius’s smiling face.’”¹²¹
Churchill and Truman exchanged urgent telegrams; Truman wrote that if they did not hold the line against the Soviets, “the whole fruits of our victory may be cast away and none of the purposes of World Organization to prevent territorial aggression and future wars will be attained.”¹²² Churchill, of course, agreed…
“In San Francisco, on June 26, the United Nations Charter was signed. Even as bloody battles were being fought in the Pacific and the Far East, a blueprint for avoiding future war had been agreed upon by the victorious powers. But the power of the gun and the tank was still determining territorial change. Three days after the Charter was signed the new Czechoslovak government signed a treaty with the Soviet Union, ceding its eastern province of Ruthenia. The citizens of Ruthenia, having been annexed by Hungary during the war, became Soviet citizens, subjected overnight to the harsh panoply of Soviet Communism…”¹²³
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The United Nations did much valuable humanitarian work both in the immediate post-war period and for many decades after. Particular important for its work in Europe after VE Day was UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). In fact, as Tony Judt writes, “there are actually many UNs, of which the political and military branches (General Assembly, Security Council, Peacekeeping Operations) are only the best known. To name but a few: UNESCO (the Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, founded in 1945); UNICEF (the International Children’s Emergency Fund, 1946); WHO (World Health Organization, 1948): UNRWA (the Relief and Works Agency, 1949); UNHCR (the High Commission for Refugees, 195), UNCTAD (the Conference on Trade and Development, 1963), and ICTY (the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, 1993). Such international units don’t include intergovernmental programs under the UN’s aegis; nor do they cover the many field agencies established to address particular crises. These include UNGOMAP (the Good Offices Mission to Afghanistan and Pakistan that successfully oversaw the Soviet withdrawal there), UNAMSHIL (the Mission in Sierra Leone, 1999), UNMIK (the Mission in Kosovo, 1999) and many others before and since.
“Much of the work done by these units is routine. And the ‘soft’ tasks of the UN – addressing health and environmental problems, assisting women and children in crisis, educating farmers, training teachers, providing small loans, monitoring right abuse – are sometimes performed just as well by national or nongovernmental agencies, though in most cases only at UN prompting or in the wake of a UN-sponsored initiative. But in a world where states are losing the initiative to such nonstate actors as the EU or multinational corporations, there are many things that would not happen at all if they were not undertaken by the United Nations or its representatives – the UNICEF-sponsored Convention of the Rights of the Child is a case in point. And while these organizations cost money, we should recall that UNICEF, for example, has a budget considerably smaller than that of many international businesses.
“The United Nations works best when everyone acknowledges the legitimacy of its role. When monitoring or overseeing elections or truces, for example, the UN is often the only external interlocutor whose good intentions and rightful authority are acknowledged by all the contending parties. Where this is not the case – at Srebrenica in 1995, for example – disaster ensues, since the UN troops can neither use force to defend themselves nor intervene to protect others. The reputation of the UN for evenhandedness and good faith is thus its most important long-term asset. Without it the organization becomes just another tool of one or more powerful states and resented as such.”¹²⁴
In spite of this innate weakness, the United Nations has exercised an influence in one area that is enormous and, arguably, enormously harmful. Through its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was approved on December 9, 1948, it provided in essence a new moral code for the world, a code that has no religious base - unless atheism is considered to be a religion. However, this has not prevented the pseudo-Christian West from embracing it enthusiastically, considering it to be the culmination of Christian Capitalist culture – as has, for quite different and more sinister reasons, the Communist East.
The philosophy of human rights goes back a long way in western history – at least to Grotius in the seventeenth century and perhaps as far as the medieval scholastics. The French Declaration of Human Rights of 1789 located the source of human rights in the sovereign power of the nation. However, most human rights are universal, that is, they are framed in perfectly general terms that apply to all men and women; so to locate their obligatoriness, not in some supra-national or metaphysical sphere, but in particular nations or states that may, and often do, disagree with each other, would seem illogical.
The problem, of course, is that if we pursue this argument to its logical conclusion, it would seem to entail that all national states must give up their rights and hand them over to a world government, which alone can impartially formulate human rights and see that they are observed. This logic was reinforced by the first two World Wars, which discredited nationalism and led to the first international organizations with legal powers, albeit embryonic, over nation-states – the League of Nations and the United Nations.
One of the first to formulate this development was the Viennese Jew and professor of law, Hans Kelsen, in his work, A Pure Theory of Law. “The essence of his theory,” according to Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, “was that an obligation to obey the law does not stem from national sovereignty but from a fundamental norm. In practical terms, this led after the First World War to his advocacy of an Austrian constitutional court as part of the Austrian constitution and, after the Second World War, to support for the idea of an international court with compulsory jurisdiction as a key part of the framework of the United Nations.”¹²⁵
Another Austrian Jewish academic in the same tradition was Hersch Lauterpacht. His dissertation “combined his interests in jurisprudence and Zionism with an argument about mandates granted by the League of Nations which implied that the mandate given to Britain to govern Palestine did not give Britain sovereignty. Rather, this rested, argued Lauterpacht, with the League of Nations…
“Despite the failure of the League of Nations to prevent Nazi aggression, the Second World War and the murder of his family in the Holocaust, Lauterpacht remained attached to notions of an international legal order. Before his early death in 1960, he served as a judge on the International Court at the Hague. Lauterpacht was devoted to the view that fundamental human rights were superior to the laws of international states and were protected by international criminal sanctions even if the violations had been committed in accordance with existing national laws. He advised the British prosecutors at Nuremburg to this effect. Together with another Jewish lawyer from the Lviv area, Raphael Lemkin, Lauterpacht had a major role in the passage by the United Nations General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Lauterpacht’s publication in 1945, An International Bill of Rights, also had a formative influence on the European Convention of Human Rights drawn up in 1949 and ratified in 1953.
“Lauterpacht’s public philosophy was based on the conviction that individuals have rights which do not stem from nation states. He was an internationalist who had a lifelong mistrust of state sovereignty which, to him, reflected the aggression and injustices committed by nation states and the disasters of the two world wars.”¹²⁶
However, as Pinto-Duschinsky rightly points out, while “international arbitration may be a practical and peaceful way to resolve disputes between countries,.. international courts which claim jurisdiction over individual countries do not coexist comfortably with notions of national sovereignty…”¹²⁷
In spite of that, and in spite of the terrible destruction and blood-letting caused by the idea of positive freedom in the period 1917 to 1945, in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood… Recognition of the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. While this is anodyne enough, even a superficial reading of history since 1789 should have convinced those who drew up the Declaration to be more specific about the meaning of the words “freedom” and “rights” here. They should have known that very similar statements had served as the foundation of the French revolution, and almost every other bloody revolution right up to the Russian revolution, which at that very moment was still destroying millions of souls in the name of “the spirit of brotherhood”… In any case, the Communists interpreted human rights in a very different way from the Capitalists. They saw in the theory merely a means of imposing the capitalist world-view. And there was some justification for this: the United Nations was, after all, the child of Roosevelt and his very American (but also leftist) world-view.
As John Gray writes, speaking of human rights in the context of global capitalism: “The philosophical foundations of these rights are flimsy and jerry-built. There is no credible theory in which the particular freedoms of deregulated capitalism have the standing of universal rights. The most plausible conceptions of rights are not founded on seventeenth-century ideas of property but on modern notions of autonomy. Even these are not universally applicable; they capture the experience only of those cultures and individuals for whom the exercise of personal choice is more important that social cohesion, the control of economic risk or any other collective good.
“In truth, rights are never the bottom line in moral or political theory – or practice. They are conclusions, end-results of long chains of reasoning from commonly accepted principles. Rights have little authority or content in the absence of a common ethical life. They are conventions that are durable only when they express a moral consensus. When ethical disagreement is deep a wide appeal to rights cannot resolve it. Indeed, it may make such conflict dangerously unmanageable.
“Looking to rights to arbitrate deep conflicts – rather than seeking to moderate them through the compromises of politics – is a recipe for a low-intensity civil war…”¹²⁸