Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Formation of the United Nations

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the midst of the Second World War, the Allied powers began planning ahead for what the post-war world was going to look like. The League of Nations had failed to prevent World War, too. If they were to prevent another major war from breaking out in the 20th century, they needed something else. Learning from the lessons of the past, they created a new organization that would ultimately be run by the war's winners. Learn more about how and why the United Nations was formed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:52 It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The idea of an international organization, any international organization, is a rather new concept. There really weren't any international organizations before the 19th century. The first international, intergovernmental organization was the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, founded in 1815. And this was on the heels of the Congress of Vienna, one of the first international conferences designed to establish order in Europe after Napoleon. The International Telecommunications Union was founded in 1865, and the Universal Postal Union was created in 1974.

Starting point is 00:01:41 Even the International Red Cross, which isn't technically an intergovernmental organization, was founded in 1863. This period of the 19th century also saw the rise of world's fairs and the creation of international bodies to standardize weights and measures. All of these organizations were rather ad hoc. They were formed to deal with individual issues. After the horrors of the First World War, the victors felt the need for an overarching permanent international body where countries debated and could resolve issues to hopefully prevent such a war from ever happening again. The Paris Peace Conference, which ended the war, created the League of Nations. Founded in 1920, the League had high hopes, but as I covered in a previous episode, it ultimately failed. The League of Nations ended, for all practical purposes in 1939, with the outbreak of war. The League expelled

Starting point is 00:02:33 the Soviet Union after its invasion of Poland and Germany had already quit. The remaining countries were mostly just allies. The League of Nations was mothballed but legally kept alive for the duration of the war. This was pretty much the low point of international cooperation. The creation of the United Nations began during the Second World War as a result of Allied war planning. The first step in the organization of the Allies was the Declaration of St. James Palace. On June 12, 1941, representatives from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the exiled governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway,

Starting point is 00:03:13 Poland, Yugoslavia, and France, all signed a document of principles regarding the war. In addition to a statement of principles regarding the conduct of the war, they also outlined a vision of a future post-war order made of, quote, willing cooperation of free peoples. In August, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill held a secret meeting outlining post-war peace and security principles in a document that was known as the Atlantic Charter. It emphasized the importance of no territorial aggrandizement, the right of all people to self-determination, and the restoration of self-government to those deprived of it. It also called for equal access to trade and raw materials, economic cooperation, improved

Starting point is 00:03:55 labor standards, and social security. The U.S. was not in the war at this point. However, when the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, a conference was held in Washington, D.C., in late December and early January. All the major allies, in particular the Big Four, were in attendance, the Big Four being the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. The inclusion of China as one of the Big Four was contentious. Roosevelt wanted China because he felt that they would side with the United States against the Soviets. And the thing to note is that this was before the Chinese Civil War, and China at the time was the Republic of China, the government which later fled to Taiwan, not the Communist People's Republic of China, which is the government today. The British didn't want China included because they felt that they would support the breakup of the British Empire in Asia. On January 1st, 1942, the Big Four signed a document called the Declaration by United Nations.

Starting point is 00:04:57 The next day, 22 other nations signed the document. This was not the founding of the United Nations. Rather, they used the phrase, United Nations at Winston Churchill's suggestion, who got it from a poem by Lord Byron. The poem was Child Herald's pilgrimage, which was a reference to the Battle of Waterloo. The relevant passage from the very long poem

Starting point is 00:05:19 that coined the phrase, United Nations, is as follows. Quote, Millions of tongues record thee, and anew their children lips shall echo them and say, here where the sword United Nations drew, our countrymen were warring on that day. And this is much and all which will not pass away." End quote. The term United Nations was used throughout the war to reference the Allies to distinguish them from the Axis. Even though the term was used at the time and can be seen on many propaganda

Starting point is 00:05:49 posters from the era, we seldom refer to the Allies as the United Nations anymore because of confusion with the subsequent organization of the same name. During the course of the war, as the Allied powers were conducting their war planning and when their leaders met, the subject of what to do after the war was always present. Starting in 1944, when the end of the war was in sight, discussions about what would happen after the war started to pick up. As with the Allies after the end of the First World War, there was a desire to avoid a repeat of the war. This time, however, they had the experience and lessons of the League of Nations.

Starting point is 00:06:25 In 1943, the idea of a post-war international organization was floated. At the Moscow Conference of November 1943, the Big Four Powers agreed to create, quote, at the earliest possible date of a general international organization. Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill also discussed this in person at the Tehran Conference. In September and October, 1944, the Big Four Powers met at the Dumberton Oaks Estate in the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C. to start actualizing what was set out in the Moscow Declaration the year before. During the conference, the delegates agreed on the framework for an international organization

Starting point is 00:07:04 dedicated to maintaining peace and security. Key components discussed included establishing a security council with permanent and non-permanent members, a general assembly for all member states, an international court of justice, and an economic and social council. Roosevelt actually conceived of the idea of a security council. believing that the Big Four, what he called the four policemen, would be the best force after the war to enforce peace. Each of the four policemen would be responsible for keeping the peace in their respective spheres of influence.

Starting point is 00:07:36 The United States would get the Western Hemisphere, the UK would get its empire and Western Europe, the Soviets would get Eastern Europe in much of Central Asia, and China would get East and Southeast Asia. According to Roosevelt's original plan, every country other than the Big Four, would be disarmed and banned from having any weapon larger than a rifle. That obviously didn't happen, but it was the origin of what would become the UN Security Council.

Starting point is 00:08:03 At Dumberton Oaks, the British pushed for and got the inclusion of France as a permanent member of the Security Council. At the Alta Conference in January 1945, Stalin pushed for the Security Council's permanent members to get a veto, which Roosevelt eventually agreed to. The veto ensured that the permanent members of the Security Council would never have to accept anything that was against their own national interests. And that was one of the big flaws and main reasons why the United States never joined the League of Nations. At Yalta, they also agreed that the new organization would be open to any country that declared war on Germany and Japan by

Starting point is 00:08:40 March 1, 1945. There were a whole bunch of countries that joined the Allies on paper during this period, including most South American countries, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. By this time, the rough organization of the United Nations had already been determined. Fifty Allied Nations, the United Nations of the Second World War, arrived in San Francisco on April 25, 1945, about two weeks before Germany surrendered. The conference was the United Nations Conference on International Organization, and the conference was sponsored by the Big Four Powers. And it should be noted here that the United Nations was never intended.

Starting point is 00:09:23 intended to be an organization of equals. From its very inception, it was intended to be run by and special privileges given to the major allied powers of the Second World War. The 50 national representatives worked for two months to create the United Nations Charter. One of the important changes was the formal addition of France as a permanent Security Council member at the insistence of the British. The United Nations Charter was completed and signed by the attending representatives on June 26th. However, the charter was not officially ratified until it had been approved by the governments of the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of all the other members. The final ratification and the birth of the United Nations took place

Starting point is 00:10:06 on October 24, 1945. The last meeting of the League of Nations was held on April 18, 1946, which was really just a matter of formally dissolving the organization and transferring all of its assets over to the UN. Once the UN was formed, there was the issue of where the General Assembly and the Security Council would physically meet. The first meeting of each body actually took place in 1946 in London. The original goal of the United Nations was to have a city for its headquarters that was independent of any country. That ended up proving impossible, so they ended up accepting a gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr. for 18 acres, or 7.3 hectares of land in New York City on the island of Manhattan along the East River. In 1947, they received submissions for the

Starting point is 00:10:56 design of the UN headquarters and selected a proposal from the Brazilian architect Oscar Neemeyer and the Swiss architect La Corbusier. The building was completed in 1952. One question that many people have about the UN headquarters is whether it's technically a part of the United States? The answer is yes, but the entire UN headquarters has extraterritorial status. I've previously done an episode on the concept of extraterritoriality, but suffice to say it has the same legal standing as an embassy. In the case of the UN, the ambassador would be the U.N. Secretary General. Security on the property is actually handled by United Nations Security, and New York City Police cannot enter the grounds unless invited by the Secretary General.

Starting point is 00:11:42 A few people who work at the UN do have diplomatic immunity, but the vast majority do not. There is one final thing regarding the UN that I should address. As I mentioned, the five permanent members of the Security Council have a lot of power. However, just as the UN was being formed, something happened in one of the member states. China had been fighting a long civil war, and the communists eventually won in 1949 and pushed the nationalist forces to Taiwan. The seat on the Security Council was held by the Republic of China, which was now a small island with a few million people, whereas the People's Republic of China had power on the mainland over hundreds of millions of people. While having a communist country completely defeated Roosevelt's purpose for having China sit on the Security Council to begin with,

Starting point is 00:12:32 it kind of became obvious to everyone that having Taiwan represent China in the UN made no sense given the size of mainland China. In 1971, a resolution submitted by Albania passed with a two-thirds vote in the General Assembly to have the People's Republic of China fill China's seat. And what's really interesting, most countries were in favor of a two-state solution where both Chinas would be represented in the UN. But both Chinas were against it because both of them claimed to be the only real China. A similar but not quite the same problem came up in late 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved. Unlike the China problem, Russia just became the successor state to the Soviet Union,

Starting point is 00:13:15 even though every other former Soviet Republic had to be approved to join the UN, and there is technically no provision for Russia to have a permanent seat on the Security Council, only the Soviet Union. There's a lot more to say about the United Nations, and I will do so in future episodes. In its almost 80 years of existence, it has had its share of accomplishments and scandals. Nonetheless, unlike the League of Nations, it has managed to survive, and it may have played a part in ensuring that the Cold War never turned into a hot war. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Ben Long and Cameron Kiefer. I have an error that I need to correct that many, many of you had pointed out.

Starting point is 00:14:02 In my episode on the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, I said that the Philippines was the fourth largest country in the world. What I meant to say is that it was the 14th largest country in the world. And that's literally what I had written down in the script, and somehow I read it wrong when I was recording. Mea culpa, mea calpa, mea maxima calpa. Remember that if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Formation of the United Nations

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