Mazower Summary

We often think of the UN as a great palace of international community and equality amongst nations. But it's ideological origins are more complex than we often realize. The founders had much different political motivations than the Charter or any of the public statement about the UN would tell us. At the very least, the UN is meant to act as a peacekeeping force in world politics. But it often fails to achieve even this goal. The UN, much like the League of Nations that came before it, was designed to preserve the status quo of the European imperial powers as opposed to an institution designed to protect selfdetermination of Third World countries, as some might consider the goal of the organization today. The US, Britain and Russia were more than happy to join the UN at its inception because they were given great special powers. We must remember, though, that the main problem after 1945 was how to keep Russia and America from nuking each other. The UN would act as a organization for mediation this power struggle while still allowing Britain to pursue its imperial ambition.

Jan Smuts
Smuts was a believer in the civilizing mission of the white man towards the rest of the non-white world. Although he said he was not a racist, his description of "backwards" or uncivilized people shows his view of European superiority over non-white peoples. His public career in South Africa exemplified this philosophy through his policies towards the native South Africans and the Indian immigrants. Regardless of his racial views, Smuts was a central character in the creating of the UN and the writing of its founding documents. He believed that the organization should be more than just a legal document that tried to prevent war. It should be a statement of the values of the Western Allies that emerged victories against Nazi Germany. His main motivation was to preserve the white rule over the world through international cooperation. And he saw in the UN a an institution that would legitimize this rule. He saw the model of the British Empire as the example that the League of Nations (in which he was also an influential founding member) and the UN. In the case of the League, he argues that the British Empire would be better off with a post-war international organization to help the British oversee world order and tie even further the alliance between the empire and the US. Could backwards peoples be capable of governing themselves? Smuts thought this impossible, but the Americans' had a childish faith in democracy and its capability within these new countries.

Alfred Zimmern
Zimmern was a product of the Oxbridge system who studied the ancient Greeks as a scholar. His Victorian interpretations of these ancient peoples would heavily influence his view of international politics. He believed that the international organization that will oversee world politics through legal matters (international law) should also build and foster world citizenship. Zimmern turned to the Ancient Greeks for inspiration on how to achieve this sense of community. The Greek city-state, he believed, was the closest man could come to having a real community because people socialize to the point where they become very loyal to

their neighbors. He argued that Britain was the Athens of his day (in the time after 1919), and that it would help lead the world in the way of global community. This would give true freedom to nations around the globe. Empire, he argued, was for the broader good of humanity. The League would educate the third world in ways of a civilized society just as the ancient Greeks believed that they could bring barbarians into the polis through acculturation. Thus, Zimmern believed that a global commonwealth based on sentiments of harmony could be achieved, and he expressed this in his writings. The mechanisms of government where not that important as the mentality of the people. He believed that people could be educated towards civic mindedness and moral responsibility towards their fellow man. They should be taught that war is irrational and civic-minded and technocratic foreign policy-makers, working through the auspices of their countries, could bring about peace. Zimmern believed that national and international organizations could exist together, and that the commonwealth provided a good example of how this worked. The energies of individual countries could be preserved through the commonwealth while still being subject to a higher world order. Zimmern's mentors were pressed by the problem of growing nationalism in the colonies in the British Empire during the turn of the century. They settled on the idea of allowing some autonomy to the colonists while still providing them with overall protection in world politics. Zimmern argued that this was an example of the great advantage of the British Empire: it was connected through a shared identity towards a common purpose as opposed to a synthetic political mechanism. This shared purpose was what made the empire so successful and held it together. As Woodrow Wilson believed in a community of powera confederation of democracies bound together for the purpose of defending themselves against aggressive action by outsidersso some British intellectuals believed that this could be achieve through the British Commonwealth. In particular, they believed they its purpose was to serve backwards races towards civilization. Primitive peoples could enjoy the benefit of the British Empire by being part of a greater whole, something that kept the word order. The idea of the League of Nations was to settle international disputes among nations. The British, who were instrumental in creating it, did not want it to meddle in its imperial matters. Zimmern hoped the League would be something other than a world government and something more than a weak organization. He believed that the League could lead people beyond nationalism into an international spirit. The League would be a forum for governments to discuss matters of international importance without having too many responsibilities. It would let nations preserve their own independence. It was not intended to bring independence to native peoples around the world who were ruled by the European empires or to dismantle the colonies empires. It was intended to continue and strengthen the British leadership in the world and also to bring in the influence of America. Although Zimmern believed in the British commonwealth before World War II, he later believe that America was the new best world leader after the war. Praising the US as the Athens of the modern world, he likened the new superpower to the Greek city-state that brought about enlightenment, culture and political stability to the ancient world. The Romans had corrupted the virtues of ancient Greek principles of liberalism, and American federalism was the rightful successor of Athenian democracy. America was able to spread the rule of law across a large and diverse population by infusing a sense of

morality in its population. Hence, the US would lead the world by example towards global community and peace. Zimmern's idea of bringing peace through a shared sense of morality was rejected by international relations realists who believed that states could only pursue their own interests in the international arena.

Nations, Refugees, and Territory

From the beginning of the League of Nations onwards, the peace seeking internatinoal community was faced with a troubling conundrum: How could the UN prevent nations from going to war with each other if it was composed as a body of mutually respected nations? How could the oppression of minorities be prevented in the period after World War II? The League had obviously failed to protect the Jewish people in Germany and eastern Europe. How could minority rights be protected? International law before World War II had failed to stop nations going to war with one another and even could not regulate how war was waged, scholars doubted that it could protect minority rights after even after 1945. The problem was lack of enforcement. Raphael Lemkin attempted to get the UN to have a strong stance on the rights of minorities. However, the founding nations of the UN were worried that the organization might become too meddlesome in their own affairs. Many founding countries could be accused of violations of the very concept that Lemkin sought to protect. Thus, member nations refused to pass anything with real teeth due to this fear. Moreover, many believed that the UN needed to capitalize on the worlds new favorable opinion towards human rights as opposed to collective minority rights. Overpopulation was a huge problem in Europe before the Second World War. Racial minorities, particularly the Jews of Europe, were being oppressed. The US decided it would study how to deal with this problem and began considerations on where to transfer the Jewish population of Europe. The League had essentially done nothing to protect them. The UN backed the proposal for partition of Palestine in 1947 and then granted the state of Israel admission into the General Assembly in 1949. This was a large step from what the League's policy was; it suppressed small states. The UN became the promoter of small states. The decolonization movement brought even more claims by ethnic minorities to self-determination.

Nehru and the Emergence of the Global United Nations

Because the League had so utterly failed in its mission, the founders of the UN wanted to resist any likening between the two. There was, in fact, more than they were willing to admit. Both organizations were a cooperation of independent states. However, the UN was very frank when it came to the imbalance of power between countries. It gave the Three Great Powers extensive clout through the Security Council. The General Assembly was left relatively week when compared to the League. The UN was also less favorable towards imperialism. Nevertheless, it was still a cooperation of states designed foremost to promote international stability in a world of empires and great powers. Smuts wanted to expand his influence of South Africa northward. The central British government rejected his idea, knowing that black Africans were becoming resistant towards white expansionism. Smuts formally requested that South-West Africa

be annexed by South Africa in the UN General Assembly, but a blackAfrican native, Tshekedi Khama, sought to oppose this. He did so through the forum of the UN. Although Smuts and the British Labor Party opposed his request to make an appeal, he eventually was able to influence international opinion on the matter. But the first people to use the UN as an international forum were the Indians. Their political leaders, infuriated by the longstanding domination of colonial rule by the British, saw a golden opportunity to promote their political cause during World War II. What made Britain any different from Nazi Germany, some of the leaders complained? The same type of racial exploitation is carried out by both countries, it is just that Hitler is actually honest about it. After failed attempts to get enthusiastic support from the Third Reich, Subhas Chandra Bose, sought the help of Imperial Japan. Jawaharlal Nehru, however, opposed Bose and saw a beam of light in the creation of the UN. Although the organization was at first designed to promote colonialism and imperialism, Nehru saw that there would be an opportunity to present the anti-colonial case to a new world community. He seized this opportunity when South Africa tried to pass a piece of antiIndian legislation, the 1946 Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act which sought to effectively disenfranchise the Indian people living in South Africa. But what gave a colony of a European power the qualification to speak up? He argued that there is no logical reason why Europe and America should lead the modern world while Third World country issues are ignored. Thus, India became the first subjugated nation to speak up formally against colonial rule within the UN forum. India had won a moral victory through the General Assembly, and it thus set the precedent for non-European nations to follow when bringing their cause to the international community. Furthermore, this victory by the General Assembly meant that politics overruled international law in the sense that the UN could not simply turn pressing global matter over to the lawyers. It had to face these problems within the international community.

Remarks
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