The Political Origins of the United Nations

When the Charter of the United Nations was signed on 26^th June 1945, the Second World War was still raging in the Pacific. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were yet to happen. And colonialism was very much alive and kicking. ChatGPT informs me that the following countries were still under colonial control:

Mark Mazower, in No Enchanted Palace, argues that the United Nations was no organization that miraculously grew from the ashes of the Second World War. It was ideologically birthed by powers that expected colonialism to continue thriving. While it laid out broad commitments to human rights and peace, it notably avoided direct references to minorities and stopped short of condemning colonial rule.

Mazower begins his analysis by presenting that Jan Smuts who was the Prime Minister of South Africa, a member of the British War Cabinet in both World Wars and the architect of segregation in S. Africa, was also the chief drafter of the UN Charter and the Preamble. Smuts was also closely associated with the founding of the League of Nations two decades earlier. For Mazower, with such personalities at the helm of affairs, big-power rivalry playing out in Europe, and a clamour for self-determination growing in the South, the UN was a space for these politics to also play out.

Instead I present the UN as essentially a further chapter in the history of world organization inaugurated by the League and linked through that to the question of empire and the visions of global order that emerged out of the British Empire in particular in its final decades

While I couldn’t fully agree with his analysis, the book provided me a fresh perspective on the origins of the UN.

PS: For Mazower, the rise of the voice of the former colonies was something that the founding members hadn’t anticipated. According to this NYT profile of Smuts – ‘South Africa’s Racist Founding Father Was Also a Human Rights Pioneer’:

At the very first meeting of the General Assembly, in 1946, Smuts was condemned by the leader of the Indian delegation on account of South Africa’s discriminatory treatment of its Indian minority population.

One fascinating piece was his argument on how it was India that really galvanized the organization into becoming a voice of the South, when it took on the Apartheid regime of South Africa.

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