HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

International security has traditionally been guaranteed by an arrangement of great powers. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Concert of Europe, consisting of France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, created a period of international security and a climate for economic development in Europe.

After World War II, the United States, the Soviet Union, France, China, and the United Kingdom were the five great powers that made up the security backbone of the United Nations. The ideas for international law go back to the Roman Empire and Hugo Grotius, who integrated a moral component to the traditional "Law of Nations" in his On the Laws of War and Peace (1625). He is considered the founder of modern international law. The ideas for a federation of nations are frequently traced to the 19th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant and his book Perpetual Peace (1795).

International resolution of disputes was first addressed by a Permanent Court of Arbitration established at the Hague Conference in 1899. Participation was voluntary, and it did not solve problems of national aggression. After World War I, the League of Nations was established as a world organization to promote collective security, disarmament, and a legal approach to the resolution of disputes. However, many nations, especially the United States, never joined the league, and it became powerless to act against Italian aggression against Ethiopia in 1935 or to prevent the outbreak of World War II. The United Nations was designed to address the known shortcomings of its predecessors.

The term "United Nations" was coined by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II to refer to the Allies. Its first formal use was in the January 1942 Declaration by the United Nations, which committed the Allies to the principles of the Atlantic Charter and pledged them not to seek a separate peace with the Axis powers. Thereafter, the Allies used the term "United Nations Fighting Forces" to refer to their alliance.

Roosevelt, in the midst of a two-front war, yearned to form a new international organization led by the great powers because of the failure of the League of Nations. He believed that the participation of all the great powers – great power unanimity and responsibility – was the key to the success of this new organization.

Roosevelt also wanted to maintain the Soviet Union's goodwill as it had not only borne the brunt of the fighting in Europe. He was thought necessary to join the war effort in the Pacific to bring about Japan's earliest possible defeat. Roosevelt, adamant in wanting full great power participation for a postwar United Nations, acquiesced in the Russian installation of satellite states as its troops conquered German forces in Eastern Europe; Soviet dictator Josef Stalin alleged creating this "buffer zone" was now required for Russian security. ^[2]

The idea for the United Nations was elaborated in declarations signed at wartime Allied conferences in Moscow, Cairo, and Tehran in 1943. From August to October 1944, representatives of France, the Republic of China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union met to elaborate the plans at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, D.C.

Those talks were productive but inconclusive and were followed by the Yalta Conference (a meeting of the United States, United Kingdome, and USSR in the Crimea) in February 1945, which produced proposals outlining the purposes of the organization, its membership, and organs, as well as arrangements to maintain international peace and security and international economic and social cooperation.

In the U.S., churches took leadership in attempting to establish a worldwide organization so that nations could resolve their differences before conflicts escalated into war. In 1944, the Federal Council of Churches – the predecessor of the National Council of Churches of Christ – created a Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, chaired by John Foster Dulles (who later became Secretary of State). After Dumbarton Oaks, the Federal Council of Churches issued a provocative statement observing:

It has been suggested that religious organizations sought to include universal elements in the thinking and language that led to the final United Nations Charter. Still, in the end, language that referred to the fundamental bases of building peace, especially with religious connotations, was removed in order to appease the Soviet Union.

It was at Yalta that the voting procedure of the United Nations Security Council was agreed upon. Although at Dumbarton Oaks, it was generally agreed that permanent members of the Security Council could exercise a veto, Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta decided the five permanent members (including France and China) could veto anything other than procedural issues.

Having secured Stalin's agreement to participate in the United Nations, Roosevelt then accepted that the USSR be given three votes in the United Nations General Assembly: one for the USSR itself and one each for the Soviet socialist republics of Ukraine and Byelorussia (now Belarus). The Soviet Union thus gained the ability to veto future UN Security Council resolutions as the price of its entry into the UN, as well as gained two additional General Assembly seats.

Overall, the emerging UN appeared to be a great power creature bent on meeting Soviet security demands and insistence that a few great powers be able to swiftly make decisions and carry them out. This understandably gave the impression to many that the UN was going to be less a viable peacemaking institution and more a vehicle for great powers to maintain peace through spheres of influence.

On April 25, 1945, the United Nations Conference on International Organization began in San Francisco with delegates from 50 nations. Some civil society representatives did participate in delegations. Still, in the end, significant input from civil society and religious organizations, in particular in the UN's inception, appears to have been negligible. Apart from this, during the San Francisco Conference, further bilateral discussions on the use of the Security Council veto took place between the United States and the Soviet Union, which paved the way for full Soviet acceptance. ^[3]

The 50 nations represented at the conference signed the Charter of the United Nations two months later, on June 26. Poland, which was not represented at the conference (but for which a place among the original signatories had been reserved) added its name later, bringing the total of original signatories to 51. The UN came into existence on October 24, 1945, after the charter had been ratified by the five permanent members of the Security Council and by a majority of the other 46 signatories.

Chapter XVIII, Article 109 of the UN Charter stipulates that a general conference of members for the purpose of reviewing the current charter may be held at a date and place to be decided by two-thirds of the General Assembly and nine members of the Security Council. Article 109 further stipulates:

Initially, the body was known as the United Nations Organization (UNO), but by the 1950s, English speakers were referring to it as the United Nations or UN.

The UN describes itself as a "global association of governments facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, and social equity." As of 2017, it consists of 193 member states and two observer states, including virtually all internationally-recognized independent nations. ^[5]