United Nations
Post-WWII international organization (1945–), successor to the League of Nations
Also known as: UN, United Nations, United Nations Organization, UNO
The United Nations was founded at the San Francisco Conference of 26 June 1945 and came into formal existence on 24 October 1945 when its Charter was ratified by the five permanent Security Council members and a majority of the original 51 signatories. Quigley treats the UN in Tragedy and Hope (chiefly chs. 16–21) as the institutional embodiment of the wartime Anglo-American consensus — designed at Dumbarton Oaks (August–October 1944) and Yalta (February 1945) to manage a post-war world that the bombing of Hiroshima and the onset of the Cold War would almost immediately reshape.
From Dumbarton Oaks to San Francisco
Quigley's account of the UN's drafting begins at the August–October 1944 conferences at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington (T&H 706, 841), where American, British, Soviet, and (separately) Chinese delegations negotiated the principal Charter framework. The key institutional choices — a Security Council with great-Power veto, a General Assembly with one-state-one-vote, a Secretariat under an apolitical Secretary-General, an Economic and Social Council, an International Court of Justice, and a Trusteeship Council — were settled there. Yalta (February 1945) resolved the residual disagreement over Soviet votes in the Assembly (settled at three: the USSR, Ukraine, and Belorussia). San Francisco (April–June 1945) was, in Quigley's reading, more a ratification than a redrafting. The American delegation included Stettinius, Dulles, Alger Hiss as Secretary-General of the conference, and Stassen; the British delegation included Eden, Halifax, and Attlee.
The Quigley Framing: Continuity from the League
Quigley repeatedly emphasises the UN's institutional descent from the League of Nations. The technical bodies — the International Labour Organization, the Permanent Court (renamed International Court of Justice), the agencies for refugees, health, and statistics — passed directly from Geneva to the new system. The principal political innovation was the Security Council veto. Quigley reads the veto as a hard-headed acknowledgment that the inter-war attempt at universal collective security had failed precisely because it asked great Powers to act against their own interests; the new system would act only when the great Powers agreed, and would record (and not enforce) their disagreement when they did not. Within months of San Francisco the Cold War made this innovation operationally decisive: from 1946 the UN became the diplomatic theatre of bipolarity rather than an instrument of collective government.
Korea, the General Assembly, and Uniting for Peace
Quigley devotes substantial attention in Tragedy and Hope to the UN's role in the Korean War (1950–1953). The Soviet boycott of the Security Council over the seating of the Nationalist Chinese permitted the Council to authorize armed resistance to the North Korean invasion in June 1950 — the only such authorization in the UN's first four decades. The November 1950 "Uniting for Peace" resolution transferred residual authority on questions of peace and security to the General Assembly when the Security Council was paralyzed by veto, a procedural innovation Quigley treats as the formal moment at which the UN's design was overtaken by Cold War reality. The Hammarskjöld and U Thant Secretariats from the late 1950s would attempt to construct independent UN executive capacity (Suez 1956, Congo 1960–64), with mixed results.
Specialized Agencies and the Decolonization Era
Quigley discusses the proliferation of UN specialized agencies — FAO, UNESCO, WHO, the World Bank Group, the IMF, IAEA, UNICEF — as the principal channels through which the Anglo-American post-war reconstruction agenda was projected globally. From the late 1950s the rapid expansion of UN membership through decolonization — from 51 founding members to over 100 by 1960 and over 150 by the mid-1970s — shifted the General Assembly's center of gravity to a coalition of newly independent states. Quigley's discussion of the Bandung Conference of 1955 (T&H 1187) and the Nonaligned Movement that followed treats the UN as the institutional arena in which the post-colonial Global South began to constitute itself as a diplomatic actor — a development the original drafters of the Charter had not anticipated.
Quigley's Evaluation
Quigley's overall evaluation of the UN is measured. He treats it as an indispensable but limited institution: it cannot enforce the will of any majority against any great Power; it can record collective opinion, supervise narrow specialised functions, and provide standing diplomatic infrastructure. The hope it carried in 1945 — that a permanent great-Power coalition could manage the post-war international system — was, he argues, defeated almost immediately by the bipolarization of world politics. By the 1960s the UN had become the venue for, rather than the resolver of, the great political contests of the day. The UN's significance in Quigley's larger argument is therefore as a milestone in the long Western project of supranational political organization — a project whose institutional pedigree runs from the Concert of Europe through the League to the UN, the European Economic Community, and beyond.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 706 Quigley
Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, D.C.), 706-841.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 756 Quigley
a 'Great Power' in UN, 756, 776, 905.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 776 Quigley
extraterritorial rights renounced (1943), 775.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 841 Quigley
Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, D.C.), 706-841.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 942 Quigley
Straight founded a new magazine, the United Nations World, to be devoted to the support of the UN.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1187 Quigley
Bandung, Indonesia (conference of uncommitted countries, 1955), 1187.
- book-reviews Quigley
The United Nations and its specialised agencies have been the principal institutional channels for post-war American foreign-policy projection.