The US and the UN: A (surprising) historical perspective

The United Nations is universally accepted as a permanent and prominent player in international relations, even by its most vocal critics. But where did it come from? It may come as a surprise to many people that the driving force behind the UN’s creation in 1945 was in fact the United States.

The story of the San Francisco conference that led to the UN’s creation is told by Steven Schlesinger in his recently published book, Act of Creation. Schlesinger, who is Director of the World Policy Institute at the New School, came to speak at Fletcher on November 10, 2003 (http://www.worldpolicy.org).

What became clear through his research, Schlesinger said, was that the central figure in the UN’s formation was Franklin Roosevelt: “He had this huge vision that if America was to survive the Second World War, there had to be an international security organization that would come out of it. Otherwise, the war was in a sense a fruitless effort.”

Seeking to replace the failed League of Nations, Roosevelt secretly instructed the State Department in 1939 to begin working on a new international organization – a move that could have cost him his political standing if it had been made public. He insisted on key changes from the League of Nations, such as reducing the universal veto power to the five most powerful countries (France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia and China) and making the Security Council’s decisions to take action binding on all member states. It was an inconspicuous State Department bureaucrat named Leon Pavlovsky who prepared the draft of the UN Charter.

The US was more powerful in 1945 than it is today, Schlesinger said, but Roosevelt “realized that power alone was not enough. Our security rested in working with all the other nations of the world in a common enterprise,” and not in unilateralism.

When Roosevelt died thirteen days before the San Francisco conference, the fate of the UN suddenly came to rest in the hands of an “enigmatic, untried, somewhat uneducated president named Harry Truman.” But Truman also dedicated himself to making the conference happen, and stayed in close contact with the US delegation during the entire nine weeks of the conference.

Schlesinger said that the conference was extremely “disputatious,” and only a “primeval feeling… that something good had to come” out of two catastrophic world wars led to the successful adoption of the UN Charter in June, 1945. Already, disputes between the US and the USSR foreshadowed the Cold War. Ironically, almost all the issues hotly debated at the conference became irrelevant after 1945, except for the decision to grant veto power only to the “P5” (the five permanent members of the Security Council).

Audience reactions to Schlesinger’s presentation were decidedly positive. Tom Catuogno, MALD ’04, said he found the talk “very balanced and informative.”

Paola Amadei, MA ’04, who also enjoyed the talk, said she found particularly interesting “the separation between what has been the history and what is going on now… The issues discussed in San Francisco didn’t have any bearing [on later UN controversies]” except for the issue of veto power.

Schlesinger expressed his hope that the book would remind Americans of their “great role” in the UN’s formation, and that “in the end, they feel some pride, because this really is one of our greatest gifts to humankind.”