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The United Nations began with the London Declaration of June 12, 1941, when various nationalities had a sense of purpose struggling against a common enemy: Hitler's Germany. They declared that "the only true basis of enduring peace is the willing cooperation of free peoples in a world in which, relieved of the menace of aggression, all may enjoy economic and social security." Signing the London Declaration of 1941 were Britain, Canada, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa and the exiled governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Yugoslavia. Charles deGaulle, in exile from France, also signed.
On January 1, 1942, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union and after the U.S. entered World War II, the above powers joined in another declaration, in Washington, joined also by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. This was called the "Declaration by United Nations." Each government pledged "to employ its full resources, military or economic" to defeat Germany, Japan and Italy. They agreed that none was to make a separate peace with the enemy. A number of Latin American nations joined the group, as did Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and some smaller African states.
At their Teheran conference in late 1943, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt discussed the possibility of a United Nations trusteeship for France's colony of Indochina (including Vietnam). The Indochinese were to be included among the "free peoples" spoken of in the London declaration but after a wait of twenty or thirty years. In deference to Churchill a UN trusteeship for India was not discussed.
In his campaign for re-election in 1944 Roosevelt argued that the United Nations had to be able to commit people to military action, "to keep the peace by force, if necessary" rather than wait for consultations, discussions and debates. He likened the latter to a local police force calling a town meeting before stopping a burglary. "It is clear," he said, "that if the world organization is to have any reality at all, our American representative must be endowed in advance by the people themselves, by constitutional means through their representatives in the Congress, with authority to act."
Beginning in September 1944, at the Dumbarton Oaks mansion in Washington D.C., representatives of the Soviet Union, Britain, the U.S. and China agreed on the structure of the UN. The purpose of the United Nations, it was declared, would be:
1. To maintain international peace and security; and to that end to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace and the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means adjustment or settlement of international disputes which may lead to a breach of the peace;
2. To develop friendly relations among nations and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
3. To achieve international cooperation in the solution of international economic, social and other humanitarian problems; and
4. To afford a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the achievement of these common ends.
The principles by which this was to be realized were:
1. The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states.
2. All members of the Organization undertake, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership in the Organization, to fulfill the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the Charter.
3. All members of the Organization shall settle their disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security are not endangered.
At the Yalta conference in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin - the Big Three - declared their resolve to establish the UN, with Roosevelt and Churchill both agreeing that the Ukraine and Byelorussia (republics within the Soviet Union) would be separate member states with their own vote. The Big Three agreed to the time and place of a founding meeting of the United Nations and that the UN would be led or dominated by the five major allied powers as permanent members of a Security Council - the U.S., Soviet Union, Britain, China, and France. The question arose about some Latin American nations joining. Stalin asked how the Soviet Union could build world security with nations that had been hostile to the Soviet Union. Churchill commented about nations that had been waiting "to see who would win," and Roosevelt apologized to Stalin for having prematurely promised these nations UN membership. He added that he was doing what he could to encourage them to declare war on Germany and that they could help write the UN Charter and become initial members when they signed the UN declaration. Stalin agreed. The question arose of a conference to discuss "territorial trusteeship and dependent areas" - in other words colonialism. Churchill became enraged, stating that as long as he was Prime Minister he would "not yield one scrap" of Britain's heritage. He was placated when the U.S. Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, showed him a report that the United States opposed putting any colony into an arrangement without the consent of the colonial power involved.
The conference for founding the U.N. began in April, 1945, at San Francisco. President Roosevelt died in April, and in May tensions arose between the Soviet Union and Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman. Truman had lived through some failed idealisms and had his doubts about the United Nations, but he wanted to adhere to Roosevelt's legacy. He did not want a return to the isolationism that had followed World War I, and he was committed to maintaining the U.S. as a player in the new internationalism. Another founding conference for the United Nations was scheduled to meet in San Francisco, and Truman said the U.S. would proceed with that conference and that if his criticism of the Soviet Union regarding Poland upset the Russians then they "could go to hell." On May 12, 1945, Truman stopped the aid called Lend Lease to the Soviet Union, but he wanted to continue working with the Soviet Union within the United Nations for the sake of peace and order.
A survey in May indicated that 40 percent of the American people doubted the conference in San Francisco would succeed. Those believing that the UN could prevent war within the coming fifty years had dropped from 49 to 32 percent. And those who believed the U.S. should join the UN was at 85 percent.
At San Francisco, delegates from fifty nations hammered out an agreement, creating the UN Charter. The Charter declared against wars of aggression and against wars that violated international agreements. The Charter declared against war crimes and crimes against humanity: genocide, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts. Articles 42 and 43 authorized the use of armed force to maintain international peace and security. Article 51 acknowledged the right of members to join together for self-defense - an issue in support of regionalism that had been advocated by Latin American countries that feared the spread of communism. Articles 55 and 56 required that "all members pledge themselves to take joint and separate action to promote "universal respect for, and observance and protection of, all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all."
The charter envisaged the regular military force available to the Security Council that had been advocated by Roosevelt. The Charter could be amended by a two-thirds majority vote in the UN's General Assembly. The General Assembly was to be a place for discussion and the making of "recommendations" regarding the maintenance of international peace and security. Responsibility to implementation was to be with the Security Council. And members of the United Nations were required to pay dues.
The United Nations sought collective agreement, but on the Security Council national sovereignty was reinforced by a requirement of unanimity - first agreed to at the Yalta Conference. Any one Security Council member could veto a decision made by other members of council. This was a provision insisted upon by the Soviet Union, which wanted protection from the capitalist powers ganging up against it. The other Security Council members were concerned about their own sovereignty and accepted it as a worthy idea. That it weakened United Nations was also accepted. Sovereignty was most important to them.
The UN was to be administered by a Secretary General, appointed by the General Assembly on recommendation of the Security Council, for a term of five years. He was to sit in on sessions of the General Assembly and to be able to bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion threatened international peace and security.
Ceremonies for the signing of the UN Charter took place at San Francisco on June 26. President Truman flew in and spoke to the gathering, saying that he would use the United Nations as a central instrument in foreign policy. He renounced great-power dominations. Strong nations, he said, should lead the way to international justice "by their own example." Let us not fail to grasp "this supreme chance," he said, "to establish a worldwide rule of reason." Ratification of the Charter by member nations was completed on October 24, 1945, and October 24 was designated as United Nations Day.
In November, a UN General Conference in London created the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Its constitution claimed that "...since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed." It described World War II as having been "made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races." The solution, according to the document was education.
Members of the Security Council failed to agree concerning the creation of a regular armed force for the UN, and no such force was created. The sense of urgency and common purpose that had existed in 1941 in Europe had slackened during the peace that followed the war in Europe.
The UN Charter failed to address the issue of independence from colonial rule, an issue that was a leading cause of the violence and a violation of a people's right to self-determination. Two members of the Security Council were the world's two greatest imperial powers: Britain and France.
France had trouble with their subject peoples at the end of the war. French troops fired on demonstrators in Morocco, Algeria and Syria. Syria and Lebanon were accepted as members of the UN in October 1945, and they asked the UN to assert its authority in allowing them freedom from the occupation of foreign troops. France and Britain complied with UN wishes, and the evacuation of Syria and Lebanon was completed by April 15.
Another problem related to colonial arose in Vietnam. The Vietnamese had declared their independence in September, 1946. In December the French navy bombarded Hanoi, killing 6,000, and the United Nations stood by as war in Vietnam progressed and France tried to force its rule onto the Vietnamese.
And their were problems outside the issue of colonialsim. During World War II, Soviet troops had been in Iran with British troops supposedly to keep oil from falling into German hands. In 1946 Iran complained to the United Nations about the presence of Soviet troops and Soviet interference in internal Iranian matters. On the Security Council the Soviet Union failed to get a postponement of a debate on the issue. The Soviet UN Ambassador walked out. The Security Council kept the issue alive and the issue was resolved by the Soviet Union talking directly with Iran and agreeing to withdraw.
Civil war was raging in Greece, and the United Nations investigated a complaint from Greece's government regarding assistance from outside Greece to Communists trying to defeat government forces militarily. A UN Special Committee was created. The fighting in Greece would continue until 1949 when the Yugoslavs, who had been supporting the Greek rebels, stopped that support.
In 1946, India complained about a new law in South Africa that commercially and residentially separated Indians within that country, India complaining that this violated the UN Charter's provision for human rights. But nothing was done to alter the course of events in South Africa.
In 1946, the UN did assume responsibility for controlling international narcotic traffic - formerly a responsibility of the old League of Nations, defunct since 1942. And the UN resolved to assume leadership in promoting international machinery to study the prevention of crime and the treatment of prisoners. The UN established its World Health Organization (WHO). The General Assembly discussed the gravity of housing problems in various places in the world. The General Assembly created the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) "to assist children of war-devastated countries and to raise the general level of child health.
The United Nations resumed what had been the League of Nations Permanent Count of International Justice. This new UN body was to settle according to international law those legal disputes that states submitted to it, and it was to give advisory opinions on legal questions that "authorized international organs and agencies" sought from it. The Court was composed of 15 judges, elected to nine-year terms, with no more than one judge of any nationality.
And the UN decided to locate its headquarters in New York City, the General Assembly accepting an $8.5 million gift from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
In Palestine, Britain had been ruling under an old League of Nations mandate. The UN General Assembly accepted Britain's plan to leave Palestine, and it endorsed a plan to partition Palestine into an independent Arab state and an independent Jewish state and to make Jerusalem as an "international" city. There had been no Soviet veto regarding the creation of Israel although Stalin had been hostile toward Zionism. Stalin was looking forward to influence with the secular and left-leaning founders of Israel.
On May 14, 1948, the day that the British mandate in Palestine expired, Israel became an independent state and Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt launched attacks on what they refused to recognize as Israel. The UN was not equipped to support its creation of Israel militarily. The United States exercised a spirit of peacemaking by putting an embargo on weaponry to Israel, but the Israelis were able to purchase weapons from Soviet controlled Czechoslovakia. Violence raged again with the UN standing by. In 1949 a UN mediator, Ralph Bunche, organized an armistice between the four-powers attacking Israel and the Israelis, and in 1950, amid hopes that a permanent peace was in the making, Ralph Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Meanwhile fighting had broken out in Kashmir between Pakistanis and Indians, a dispute rising from the partition of India that year. Violence was also taking place in Indonesia, where the Dutch were trying to hold onto rule. Indonesia had declared itself independent. There was strong condemnation of the Dutch in the United Nation, and in 1947 the Security Council ordered a ceasefire, to which both sides agreed. The Dutch renewed their war against Indonesian independence in December 1948. Under pressure from the United States in August, 1949, the Dutch agreed to another ceasefire. Without UN involvement, a conference between the Dutch and Indonesians led to an agreement and the creation of an independent Indonesia with the Dutch queen as titular head-of-state and Sukarno of Indonesia as President.
In 1948, when Stalin began blockading Western access to Berlin, the Security Council took up the issue as a threat to peace and security. The Soviet Union vetoed an attempt at a compromise solution. In January the Western powers countered with a "counter-blockade" of goods entering the Soviet sectors of Berlin. Rather than the UN it was the Berlin airlift that persuaded the Soviet Union to lift its blockade.
Then came the creation of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), seen in the Soviet Union as a hostile act. The U.S. State Department stated NATO's purpose as bringing about "world conditions which will permit the United Nations to function more efficiently." The founding declaration for NATO spoke of international peace, security and justice and of intentions of refraining from "the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." Referring to members of NATO, the declaration stated that "an armed attack against one or more ... shall be considered an attack against them all" and that NATO members had the right of individual or collective self-defense, as granted by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.
Expanding on the rights spoken of in Articles 55 and 56 of the UN Charter, on December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed a "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" (See Documents). Its preamble spoke of disregard and contempt for human rights having resulted in barbarous acts that have outraged the conscience of mankind. The declaration is thirty articles described as "a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations."
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