As World War II drew to a close in the spring of 1945, the leaders of the Allied nations sought to establish an international organization to ensure lasting world peace. Representatives of 50 nations met in San Francisco in April 1945 to flesh out an agreement on the charter of the United Nations based especially on the principle of collective security to combat aggression. Reflecting the wartime change toward internationalism in American FOREIGN POLICY, the U. S. Senate ratified the UN Charter on July 28, 1945, by a vote of 89 to 2.
From the beginning of World War II, the Allied nations opposing the Axis took steps toward international cooperation to defeat Germany and then to preserve peace in the postwar era. Representatives of nine European nations joined with Britain and members of the Commonwealth in signing the Inter-Allied Declaration in 1941, which united these countries in their efforts to liberate Europe from Hitler so that its people could live in peace and security. While the European allies took the initial step toward a United Nations with the Inter-Allied Declaration, the Atlantic Charter, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill in August 1941, linked the United States to this mission of freedom and cooperation—though Roosevelt at this stage opposed a public declaration of a new collective security organization.
The Declaration by United Nations (January 1942), the first official use of the phrase United Nations, sanctioned the goals of the Atlantic Charter and was signed by some two dozen nations, including the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Later, at the Teheran Conference (1943), Roosevelt, Churchill, and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin agreed to the idea of an international organization charged with preserving world peace.
Because of lessons learned from the coming of World War II, and because of the efforts of President Roosevelt and his administration, American public opinion and foreign policy shifted decisively toward internationalism during the early and mid-1940s. Roosevelt, like other Americans, believed that the weaknesses of the League of Nations had contributed to unchecked aggression and the breakdown of peace in the 1930s and that a new collective security organization would have to be based on a more realistic readiness to use force to stop aggression and prevent war. Learning from Woodrow Wilson’s mistakes, Roosevelt also made certain to include Republicans in the planning process.
Further discussions among the Allied nations in the fall of 1944, at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, led to several concrete proposals that were eventually included in the UN Charter, including a major role for the Security Council in preventing conflicts and brokering peace agreements. Disagreements between American and Soviet negotiators at these meetings reflected the emerging rift in SoviET-AMERiCAN relations. In February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at the Yalta Conference, where they announced plans for the United Nations Conference on International Organization.
The conference opened in San Francisco on April 25, 1945. Delegates from 50 nations worked out the details of the UN Charter, amid major disagreements over the veto power of the larger nations. Though unable to curb the role of the major Allied powers on the Security Council, the smaller nations were successful at increasing the relative importance of the other more egalitarian organs such as the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council.
Article 1 of the United Nations Charter enunciated its objectives: to maintain international peace and security; to develop friendly relations among nations based on mutual respect for the principle of equal rights and selfdetermination of peoples; to achieve international cooperation in addressing international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian nature; and to operate as a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in order to reach these ends. The charter enumerated six principal organs: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat. Chiefly responsible for keeping the peace, the Security Council was delegated the most critical task.
The five major Allied powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China—became permanent members of the UN’s peacekeeping arm, the Security Council, each holding the right to veto its actions. The charter took effect on October 24, 1945, the date celebrated annually as United Nations Day. In January 1946, the first session of the 51-member Assembly convened in London, before voting to move the UN headquarters to New York, its present location. Cold war tensions between the United States and the USSR sometimes threatened to paralyze the United Nations, casting doubt over its ability to maintain international peace and security.
In the decades after 1945 the United Nations grew to include almost every country in the world, expanding rapidly during the postwar period from 51 countries in 1945 to nearly 192 in 2009. As its budget, its mission, and its sometimes controversial role in the arbitration of conflicts between nations spread, the UN helped to establish the independent states of Israel and Pakistan in the late 1940s. Dominated by the Americans, UN forces waged the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. In addition to numerous peacekeeping missions around the world in subsequent years, various UN agencies have worked to improve health and environmental standards for the world’s people.
See also CoRDELL Hull.
Further reading: Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triwmph of Internationalism during World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967); Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the U. N. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).
—Joseph C. Gutberlet
World History
