50MINUTES - The United Nations: The Organisation at the Heart of International Diplomacy

The United Nations was not the first international organisation with a broad jurisdiction to be created in the 20 th century. It was preceded by the League of Nations, which was founded in 1919 in the wake of the First World War.

The idea for the League of Nations was put forward by Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), the American president during the war. His Fourteen Points (a series of principles designed to guide the peace process) included the creation of a global body tasked with maintaining peace so that the horrors of the Great War would never be repeated. The Covenant of the League of Nations was signed by 42 founding members, the majority of which had participated in the conflict.

The Covenant set out the organisations three main objectives:

• to prevent wars based on the principle of collective security;
• to enforce international law through the creation of a Permanent Court of International Justice in 1922, and to resolve disputes through negotiation and mediation;
• to improve citizens overall quality of life.

The League of Nations was run by a General Assembly with representatives from all the member states, a Council comprising nine members (five of which were permanent, namely Great Britain, the USA, France, Italy and Japan, and four of which were non-permanent and elected by the General Assembly), and a Secretariat tasked with the administrative management of the organisation.

Did you know?

The League of Nations marked a major shift in the philosophy of diplomacy, as it aimed to replace secret diplomacy with collective negotiation. Previously, international relations were governed by treaties, diplomatic missions and conferences, but there was often no continuity between them. Wilsons goal was therefore to create a permanent organisation tasked with defusing tensions on an international level. This laid the foundations for the new principle of collective security, whereby each country acknowledged that its security could affect the security of the other nations, and vice versa. The countries therefore agreed to coordinate a joint response to threats and infractions affecting one of them. The principle of collective action meant that each country had to be ready to react swiftly to take up arms and defend another country.

The idea behind the League of Nations was bold and represented a new outlook on diplomatic relations, but the organisation was ultimately a failure. In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the USSR invaded Poland, plunging the world into the Second World War. The League of Nations had failed in its peacekeeping role: it had proved unable to stop the rise of Nazism and to put a stop to the aggression of the Axis countries (Germany, Italy and Japan) in the interwar period.

There were multiple reasons for this failure. Firstly, the League of Nations did not have its own army and therefore relied on the goodwill of the major world powers to enforce its decisions. The organisations moral authority alone was not enough to force individual members to comply with its orders. Secondly, not all countries joined the League of Nations. Notable absences included the USA (which had been the driving force behind the creation of the organisation) and the USSR, which did not join until 1934. Without these two key powers, the defence of the League of Nations principles fell to Great Britain and France, which were both following a policy of appeasement and were reluctant to impose their will by force. Furthermore, since membership was not an essential condition to play an important role on the international stage, it was easy for countries to join and leave the League of Nations as they pleased without becoming pariahs. Consequently, certain powerful countries decided to simply leave the organisation when it tried to check their nationalist, expansionist aspirations: Japan and Germany withdrew in 1933, and Italy followed suit in 1937.

The outbreak of war in 1939 sounded the death knell for the League of Nations, but as early as 1941, when Europe was almost entirely under the yoke of the Axis powers, some countries were already thinking ahead to the end of the war and making plans for the creation of a new institution. The human and material destruction wreaked by the war underlined the need for political dialogue between countries once peace was restored. To this end, a number of countries began taking steps to prepare the way for the new organisation from the early stages of the war:

• On 12 June 1941, the Declaration of St. Jamess Palace was signed by nine governments in exile in London (Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Free France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Yugoslavia). The signatories committed to working with other free peoples in wartime and peacetime, and in doing so laid the foundations of the UN.
• On 14 August 1941, the Atlantic Charter was ratified. Before the USA entered the conflict, the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt and the British prime minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) signed a joint declaration (known as the Atlantic Charter because it was signed in a ship on the ocean) affirming their intention to create a new institution for peacekeeping and international security. Their plan outlined some of the organising principles of the postwar period, such as freedom of the seas, disarmament and the establishment of an international court of justice.