United Nations

United Nations. The United Nations (UN) is an international organization of sovereign nations, with headquarters in New York City, founded in San Francisco in 1945.Planning for the UN evolved slowly during World War II. Although its forerunner, the League of Nations, had failed to preserve peace in the 1930s, Allied leaders had become even more determined to create another, more effective international security organization after the defeat of the Axis. A U.S. State Department subcommittee on postwar planning completed its proposed draft for a new international organization in March 1943. During subsequent weeks the draft was approved by Congress as well as by the governments of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. At Teheran that December, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, and British prime minister Winston Churchill committed their countries to the contemplated postwar United Nations organization. The Big Three meeting at Dumbarton Oaks, a Washington mansion (August–October 1944), began the difficult process of formulating the new organization's structure. At the Yalta Conference of February 1945, the three leaders resumed their quest for agreement, resolving the most contentious issues of veto power and UN membership. Stalin, who earlier insisted on the right to veto any discussion in the Security Council that touched Soviet interests, accepted a proposal that seven of the council's eleven members could bring an issue before the whole council. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to Stalin's request that Byelorussia and Ukraine receive membership.

At the San Francisco Conference (April–June 1945), delegates from fifty nations—including the sponsoring countries: the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and China—drafted the official United Nations charter. These states, with the addition of Poland, became the original fifty‐one members. The conference established six principal UN organs: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat under a secretary‐general. The General Assembly, consisting of all UN member states, and the core of the organization, was authorized to “discuss any questions or any matters within the scope of the present charter or relating to the power and functions of any organs provided for in the present charter.” The Security Council, consisting of the five sponsoring powers as permanent members and six rotating members, received powers not granted to the former council of the League of Nations on matters of peace and security, notably the authority to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken to maintain or restore international peace and security.” The council could authorize economic sanctions, the severance of diplomatic relations, and even resort to military force, but was given no power to enforce such decisions. The conference accepted the principle that regional alliances could function when the Security Council failed to act.

Most of the modifications made at San Francisco in the Dumbarton Oaks's draft came in response to smaller countries' demands for a greater voice. The critical issue, however, on which hung approval of the charter, was the role of the veto in the Security Council. To assure their necessary unity, the Yalta Conference had granted the five permanent Security Council members the right to veto a council action. But at San Francisco the Soviets again denied the council the right even to discuss issues that touched the Soviet Union directly. Following direct appeals to Stalin in Moscow, the Kremlin in early June accepted the Yalta formula that retained the power to veto any Security Council action, but that no country could use its veto power to prevent council discussion of any matter brought before it. Amid a pervasive euphoria, the delegates approved the charter on 25 June 1945, and signed it the following day. In 1946, John D. Rockefeller Jr. contributed land along the East River in New York City for a permanent UN headquarters. The first UN secretary general, Trygve Lie of Norway, was succeeded by Sweden's Dag Hammarskjold (1953–1961), who died in a plane crash on a mission to the Congo, and U Thant of Burma (1962–1971).

If the United Nations charter changed little after 1945, the organization's membership and functioning changed dramatically. With the Soviet Union and its satellites reduced to a small minority of the membership, the United States, beginning with the first session in early 1946, dominated the organization on all security issues. China's seat on the Security Council, for example, was denied to the People's Republic of China, the communist government that came to power in 1949. The veto became the means whereby the Soviet Union prevented unwanted Security Council decisions. The resulting Security Council paralysis prompted the United States, backed by smaller powers as well as America's European allies, to increase the authority of the General Assembly. U.S. influence, however, ultimately diminished, as the United Nations expanded to over 180 members by the 1990s. Reflecting that growth, the Security council grew from eleven to fifteen members, while the Economic and Social Council eventually expanded to fifty‐four members. Most of the new additions were Third World states with interests and concerns at odds with those of the major powers. By the 1980s, the United States on many key issues could command only a small minority of voting allies and repeatedly used its Security Council veto power. This loss of control, added to perennial complaints of bureaucratic inefficiency and waste, prompted Congress in 1982 to withhold payment of America's UN dues.

Twice the United Nations supported the United States's recommendations to marshal force to resist external aggression: first to confront North Korea's invasion of South Korea in 1950; then to repel Iraq's occupation of Kuwait in 1990. In 1956, a UN Emergency Force for Palestine played a part in securing and maintaining an armistice after the Suez Crisis of that year. Many UN peacekeeping activities, especially in the post–Cold War Era, also responded to U.S. and international concerns, but the UN, limited to peacekeeping functions, could succeed only where the contending parties accepted its intervention. UN efforts in Bosnia, Somalia, and Cambodia during the presidency of Bill Clinton, for example, revealed the organization's limitations in dealing with ongoing civil conflict; UN brokered peace processes, however, helped several Central American countries to end their civil wars and establish more democratic structures during the 1990s.

The United Nations played a significant role in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91 and in the events preceding the U.S.‐led Iraq War of 2003. Through most of the 1990s, UN weapons inspectors monitored Iraq's compliance with a 1991 Security Council resolution requiring Iraq to dismantle its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. UN officials also supervised the Security Council's postwar sanctions on Iraq's oil exports. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on the United States, the George W. Bush administration, thanks mainly to Secretary of State Colin Powell, sought UN Security Council backing for its proposed attack on Iraq. Both Bush and Powell addressed the UN General Assembly, seeking to build support. When the Security Council failed to provide such authorization, and instead called for renewed weapons inspection, the Bush administration launched the preemptive war on its own with an ad hoc coalition of Great Britain and several other nations.

Following Saddam Hussein's overthrow, the UN sought to facilitate the transition to a new Iraqi government. When Iraqi insurgents bombed the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003, however, killing seventeen, including the top UN envoy in Iraq, Sergio Viera de Mello, Secretary General Kofi Annan withdrew the UN mission. As the situation deteriorated in 2004, the United States turned to the United Nations to facilitate the transfer of power to an Iraqi authority. That even so unilateralist a U.S. administration as that of George W. Bush found it advisable to seek UN support for its actions testified to the role the international body had come to play in world affairs.

A significant part of the UN's activities have been carried out by its specialized agencies, including the World Health Organization (WHO); United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF); and the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). A temporary organization, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), helped in resettling refugees after World War II. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development sponsored the international “Earth Summit” held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992.

Although not the prelude to world government that some of the founders had hoped for (and some feared), the UN has played a minor but important role in sustaining world peace.
See also Baruch, Bernard; Foreign Relations; Internationalism; Korean War, Persian Gulf War.

Bibliography

Leland M. Goodrich and and A.P. Simon , The United Nations and the Maintenance of International Peace and Security, 1955.
R.B. Russell , A History of the United Nations Charter: The Role of the United States, 1940–1945, 1958.
Leland M. Goodrich , The United Nations, 1959.
Lori Fisher Damrosch, ed., Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts, 1993.
Roger A. Coate , U.S. Policy and the Future of the United Nations, 1995.
Stanley Meisler , United Nations: The First Fifty Years, 1995.

Norman A. Graebner

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer