Early British efforts to shape the post-war international order
Andrew Ehrhardt
When scholars and commentators speak about the ‘post-1945 international order’ today, there is often little attention paid to the diplomats and officials who sought to ‘order’ such a system during the Second World War. Historical narratives of this so-called ‘ordering moment’, have largely focused on the influence of the United States, much to the detriment of other governments involved. Among those who planned for and negotiated certain tenets of this post-war system, the United Kingdom played a prominent role. Its work towards establishing the United Nations Organization, in particular, was indispensable; and it is this history which offers some insight for contemporary challenges.
During the first year of the war British cabinet ministers and senior officials in the Foreign Office were reluctant to begin planning for the period after the war. As Sir Alexander Cadogan, head of the Foreign Office, wrote, ‘we should be over-ambitious if we planned our edifice now, without knowing what materials we shall have wherewith to build.’
But events forced British diplomats to respond. Hitler’s announcement of a ‘new order’ for Europe, in particular, led officials in Whitehall to believe that they needed to offer an alternative vision. In other words, it was no longer enough to state what they were fighting against, but rather, they needed to describe what they were fighting for. This thinking reveals an important insight into the way that these diplomats and officials conceptualized international order — namely, that an alternative ordering system provided the intellectual basis upon which their own vision of world order was constructed.
However, even with the increased focus on developing post-war aims, little progress was made during 1940. A cabinet committee on war aims met five times through the autumn, but little came from these efforts. As Prime Minister Winston Churchill told a senior American representative, ‘All this talk about war aims was absurd at the present time.’ Despite Cabinet intransigence at this stage, officials in the Foreign Office were beginning to coalesce around certain fundamental points about the post-war world.
First and foremost, the United States would need to be brought into the post-war maintenance of peace on the European continent; and second, larger economic and political ordering systems were deemed necessary to preserve future British interests. The famed Atlantic Charter of August 1941, originally drafted by Cadogan himself, reflected these basic precepts as they had developed throughout the early years of the war. Specifically, the mention of ‘the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security’ (in point eight of the Charter) would become one of the key points of reference for future British planning for a post-war international organization.
Despite these advances, more detailed post-war planning was sporadic well into the spring of 1942. It was in these months that senior officials began speaking of the need to develop a ‘grand strategy of peace’. By June 1942, the Foreign Office set up its first dedicated planning body, the Economic and Reconstruction Department, which became the nucleus of British thinking about a post-war international organization. Led by the capable and ambitious diplomat Gladwyn Jebb, the department went on to produce its first major memorandum for the post-war period. Titled ‘Four Power Plan’, the concept was based on what Jebb had earlier termed a ‘concert of the world’, in which the four major powers — the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China — would operate at the centre of a wider grouping of states belonging to the United Nations.
This document led to a robust debate within the British war cabinet, where ministers introduced their own counter-proposals for regional and international structures. Though still resistant to discussing post-war matters, Churchill himself revealed his idea for a ‘Council of Europe’ at the end of the war. Others, such as Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, recommended that the government forego relations with Europe and focus on consolidating and protecting the British Empire. But it was the recommendation of the Lord Privy Seal, Sir Stafford Cripps — one which called for a number of regional councils to sit under a ‘world council’ — which was eventually combined with Jebb’s Four Power Plan. By early January 1943, their combined proposals gave rise to a new document, titled the ‘United Nations Plan’, which would become the basis of the British plans for a post-war international organization.
While this wider research project reveals important insights into the creation of the United Nations Organization during the Second World War, it also highlights key aspects of British diplomatic history in the period. Most importantly, it reveals how British statesmen sought to balance national interests with wider regional and international ordering systems. Far from seeing the post-war world through narrow ‘realist’ or ‘idealist’ paradigms, their views combined elements of power politics and internationalism.
It is an approach which bears some important insights for the present day, as policymakers, scholars and commentators in the western world champion the merits of the post-1945 order and seek to uphold its basic pillars in an increasingly unstable and unpredictable world. But crucial to this task is understanding how exactly the earliest tenets of that system were forged — in particular, the way diplomats and officials conceptualized international order and how they sought to balance national interests with internationalist aims in the interests of forging a more peaceful and stable world.
Andrew Ehrhardt is the Engelsberg Applied History Postdoctoral Fellow with the Centre for Grand Strategy in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
New Voices in Global Security is a collaborative blog series between the School of Security Studies, King’s College London, and International Affairs. Drawing on cutting edge research, the blog series highlights diverse empirical, methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding global security and engages with questions of equality, diversity and inclusion within the discipline. Contributions are based on the New Voices event series — organized and chaired by Dr Amanda Chisholm, School Equality, Diversity and Inclusion lead — which promotes the research of PhD students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) working both within and beyond the School of Security Studies.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
