Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security PDF
Preview Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security
Dumbarton Oaks Till the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled In the ferliament of Man, the Federation of the \M>rld. There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe And the kindly earth shall slumber Lapt in universal law. —Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” 1842 Dumbarton Oaks The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security by Robert C. Hilderbrand The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill and London © 1990 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 94 93 92 91 90 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hilderbrand, Robert C, 1947- Dumbarton Oaks : the origins of the United Nations and the search for postwar security / by Robert C. Hilderbrand. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8078-1894-1 (alk. paper) 1. Dumbarton Oaks Conference (1944) 2. United Nations. 3. Security, International. I. Title. JX1976.3.H55 1990 341.23*09—dc20 89-28392 CIP For Jan Contents Preface ix Introduction: Federation of the World? 1 1 Preparing for Peace 5 2 Preparing for the Conference 30 3 The Conference Begins 67 4 Plans and Principles 85 5 The Assembly and the Court 108 6 The Security Council 122 7 A World of Troubles 159 8 Impasse 183 9 Conflict and Compromise 209 10 Bring on the Chinese 229 Conclusion: Quod Sevens Metes 245 Appendix 258 Notes 261 Bibliography 299 Index 309 A section of illustrations will be found following page 107. Preface In the two generations since its founding in 1945, the United Nations Organization has come in for harsh criticism. It has disappointed some of its strongest supporters—and to such a degree that even in the United States, the nation that served as its historical midwife, there are now many who doubt whether the birth of a world body was such a good idea in the first place. The reasons for this disenchantment can be found in newspaper headlines almost daily: The U.N. has failed to erect a lasting structure for the mainte nance of world peace, or even to prevent the postwar Great Powers, which brought it into existence as a symbol of their continuing cooperation, from drifting into a state of permanent conflict. Whatever may be said of its genuine achievements as a force for order and goodwill in a dangerous and troubled world, the United Nations has not lived up to the larger promises of lasting peace made at the end of the Second World Wir. If it is true, as someone has said, that a good way to find out about a people is to study its dreams, then the citizens of all the Great Powers can take just pride in the very idea of a United Nations. As originally developed in each of the Big Four nations, the dream that led to the creation of a new world body was a vision of lasting peace—a dream of ending, once and for all, mankind’s curse of war. It was a grand and bold idea, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it called upon the major nations themselves to behave unselfishly at their moment of final victory in the Second World Wir. Nor did the early plans for putting the dream into effect lack strength or imagination. They envisioned a world where cooperation tempered competition, where power entailed respon sibility, where the shared desire for order limited sovereignty. They called for the prevention of war, when necessary, through the enforcement of peace. We know that these dreams and the plans they led to have not been realized. The question we must ask is. Why not? The answer to this question is not to be found, as the U.N.'s critics seem to suggest, in the way the organization has developed since 1945. We must go back further, to the final plans for the world body itself, plans that made a stronger U.N. impossible by vitiating the strongest features of the Great Powers’ original ideas for an organization that would be able to maintain permanent peace. These final plans were drawn up, ironically enough, by the Great Powers themselves during the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of August and September x Preface 1944. It was there that the representatives of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union decided that their own, individual interests were too important to entrust to a world body, that the wartime dream of an interna tional peacekeeping agency might interfere with their own nationalistic dreams of hegemony, and that their differences, highlighted by current events in Eastern Europe, might make their full cooperation impossible and, perhaps, undesirable. It was there that, for those hoping for a strong United Nations Oiganization, the shadow fell between the word and the deed. That all of this is not more widely known is due primarily to the fact that so litde has been published about the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. No book exists on the meeting itself, and the best of the more general works on the postwar settlement, Thomas Campbell’s Masquerade Peace and Robert Divined Second Chance, treat the conference ably but in little more than summary form. Thus, one reason for widespread misconceptions about what the United Na tions has done is a lack of detailed understanding about what it was really intended to do. A study of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference reveals that the U.N.’s shortcomings did not develop out of a failure of application; they were an intentional part of the plans for the world body as negotiated by the Great Powers in the summer of 1944. This book is an attempt to explain how this happened—how the wartime dream of world peace led to plans for a postwar organization lacking the authority to achieve it. It is the story of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. Naturally, I have not undertaken such a project without the assistance of many others, and 1 am happy for this opportunity to express my gratitude for their generous aid and support. The Office of Research at The University of South Dakota supported my efforts over two summers, one devoted to research and another to writing. Its generosity helped make this study possible. Without research librarians we would all be lost—in the stacks, if not earlier. I have debts to many of them at several facilities: the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Public Record Office in London, the Franklin D. Roosevelt library, Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, and Mudd Library at Princeton University. My manuscript has also benefited from the support and advice of my editors and readers at the University of North Carolina Press. This book is dedicated to Jan Hilderbrand, who brought peace and order to my world.
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