Mazower - No Enchanted Palace

No Enchanted Palace

LAWRENCE STONE LECTURES

Sponsored by

The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies and Princeton University Press 2008

A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book.

Mark Mazower

No Enchanted Palace

The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2009 by Mark Mazower

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Fifth printing, and first paperback printing, 2013

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-15795-5

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Mazower, Mark.

No enchanted palace : the end of empire and the ideological origins of the United Nations / Mark Mazower.

p. cm. (Lawrence Stone lectures)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-13521-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. United NationsHistory. 2. ImperialismHistory20th century. 3. World politics19001945. I. Title.

JZ4986.M39 2010

341.23dc22

2009016699

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon text with Constantia Display

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5

Contents

The Jews and the Lessons of the Nazi New Order

Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to Gyan Prakash, the Davis Center for Historical Studies, and the Department of History at Princeton University for the invitation to deliver the 2007 Stone Lectures on which much of this book is based, and for their generous hospitality. I was fortunate enough to get to know Lawrence Stone in his last years at Princeton, and I feel honored to be able to offer this small tribute to him. I am grateful to Princeton University Press for their support of the lectures and of their publication, and to Brigitta van Rheinberg in particular for her attentive readings of successive drafts and many insightful suggestions. was originally delivered as the 2008 Tsakopoulos Lecture at Columbia University, and my thanks go to Kyriakos Tsakopoulos for the invitation to deliver that lecture. I should also like to acknowledge the help I received in thinking through these issues from among others Cemil Aydin, Duncan Bell, Manu Bhagavan, Alan Brinkley, Partha Chatterjee, Saul Dubow, Marwa Elshakry, Sheldon Garon, Nicolas Guilhot, Peter Mandler, Scott Moyers, Samuel Moyn, Phil Nord, Susan Pedersen, Derek Penslar, Carne Ross, Mira Siegelberg, Anders Stephanson, Helen Tilly, and Stephen Wertheim. Discussing these issues with my students at Columbia and at seminars at the Center for International History has in some ways helped most of all.

No Enchanted Palace

We cannot indeed claim that our work is perfect or that we have created an unbreakable guarantee of peace. For ours is no enchanted palace to spring into sight at once, by magic touch or hidden power. But we have, I am convinced, forged an instrument by which, if men are serious in wanting peace and are ready to make sacrifices for it, they may find means to win it.

Remarks by Lord Halifax, British ambassador to the United States and acting chairman of the UK delegation, San Francisco, 26 June 1945

A new chapter in the history of the United Nations has begun. With these confident words, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali greeted the end of the Cold War and hailed the extraordinary opportunity it presented his organization. The decades-long standoff between the superpowers had marginalized it, but the collapse of the USSR offered the UN not only challenges but renewed meaning. Its peacekeeping role could now be expanded and the mandate for its soldiers made more robust. It could take an active role not only in resettling refugees from war-torn states but also in facilitating political

Here was the dream of a new founding momentas if the world had turned back the clock to the hopes of 1945. Yet if such an opportunity really existed, it was gone almost at once. Civil wars in the Balkans and Africa, and above all the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, provoked critics to fume at the UNs impotence. A series of high-level initiatives designed to reform the organization since then have run aground, while new and previously unimagined layers of internal corruption came to light. Prodded by the Clinton administration, NATO bombed Kosovo without Security Council approval, setting a precedent in which the UN was bypassed in the name of humanitarian intervention. In the new millennium, the administration of George W. Bush advanced a national security doctrine whose advocacy of preemptive war marked an unabashed repudiation of the basic principles on which the UN had been founded. Under Ronald Reagan, the United States had earlier weakened ties with the International Court of Justice; now it also turned its back on the new International Criminal Court, and it undermined international arms control regimes as

Today there is no shortage of proposals to reform it. Some want it to be streamlined to allow fast military action against rogue states and other international outlaws: maybe the Security Council can be enlarged, the veto power of the permanent members weakened, the idea of a UN military staff resurrected. Others feel it should move more toughly against human rights offenders among its own members and do more to stamp certain valuesfreedom, for instance, and democracyon the world before it is too late (and, though the fear is rarely voiced, before the Chinese take over). There is the call for it to promote something called human securitya blend of development goals and rightsand to claim the right to intervene in defense of the worlds citizens when their own governments maltreat them. Yet the suspicion that it is basically too far gone for any reform to restore it to a central role in international affairs is pervasive. Few people seem to feel that the world would

This is a discussion about the UNs future place in the international system. But inevitably it rests on an understanding of its past. Indeed, the intensity of present disillusionment is closely linked to a sense of despair at how far it has fallen short of the standard supposedly set by its founders. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali justified his expansive 1992 vision of what the UN should do as a way of belatedly realizing the lofty goals originally envisaged by the charter. Critics agreed. The UNs rules had long been in abeyance; said one commentator, defending U.S. policy in the spring of 2003, There had been no progress for years. The international system, he went on, had simply developed in a way that condemned the UN to fade into irrelevance, or at best, to limp along. The Bush administration was harsher still. It foresaw the UN headed for complete irrelevancejust like the League of Nations between the warsif it failed to get tough with Saddam Hussein: the invasion of Iraq was, it claimed, adverting to the 1930s, its Abyssinia crisis, or perhaps even Munich.