Revisiting the 1942–1945 United Nations

This article is re-published * as part of Fridays With MUNPlanet and its series dedicated to world politics and the United Nations. This time PassBlue brings you an article by Thomas G. Weiss (City University of New York) who writes about the period of history which brought about the emergence of the United Nations. As Weiss argues”too much current scholarly and diplomatic energy is devoted to elucidating the global sprawl of networks and informal institutions, and too little is given to the requirements for strengthened intergovernmental organizations, most especially the UN”, and points to the 1940s as the period that “should give us the courage to formulate more ambitious visions about improving future world orders.”

The 70th anniversary of the signing and entry into force of the United Nations Charter should draw attention to the 1942–45 United Nations Alliance that gave rise to the world body and the underpinnings of contemporary global governance. While anniversaries are in some ways an artificial “hook,” they are nonetheless a way not to forget. Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I and the 75th of the outbreak of World War II, and this year the 200th anniversary of the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

These armed conflicts led to experiments in international organization after rampant nationalism and going-it-alone were exposed as vacuous for planning subsequent peace and prosperity. The irony, of course, is that today’s growing list of intractable problems, ranging from climate change and migration to pandemics and terrorism, goes well beyond the power of states acting alone. And yet, in Europe the supranational experiment with the European Union seems under attack from many sides; and except for these hallowed halls here on First Avenue in New York, the UN is an afterthought if a thought at all.

What remains unchanged after seven decades is that the policy authority and resources necessary for tackling such problems remain vested in individual states rather than collectively in intergovernmental organizations. The fundamental disconnect between a growing number of global challenges and the current inadequate structures for international problem-solving and decision-making helps explain occasional, tactical and short-term local views and responses instead of sustained, strategic and longer-run global perspectives and actions.

So why go back to the period of 1942 to 1945? Because, to put it quite simply, the rediscovery of the wartime UN contradicts the conventional wisdom that liberalism was abandoned to confront the Nazis and Imperial Japan; it asserts that Kantian ideals were essential to the Hobbesian objective of state survival. The attendant historiographical question is why the wartime UN has disappeared from academic and policy consciousness.

You can read the full article on MUNPlanet.

Cover Image: [Meeting of Commission I, General Provisions, Committee 1 on Preamble, Purposes and Principles; Henri Rolin (Belgium), Chairman. 4 May 1945. UN Photo/Lundquist, via UN Photo, Flickr]