answersLogoWhite

0

The mainstream narrative of the United Nations has long been that its creation in 1945 was an almost revolutionary act that constituted a seminal answer to the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust and must be seen as an unprecedented universal (even though U.S.-led) attempt to achieve world peace and guarantee human rights (see Amrith and Sluga 2008). In this context, the positive accounts on the UN's history in recent years seem to be due to the "New World Order" proclaimed by former U.S. President George H.W. Bush and the intellectual reaction to Goerge W. Bush's unilateralism in order to show that the UN does matter (Mazower 2009: 5). Apparently, however, not only historians, also international relations (IR) scholars failed to appropriately address the complex nature of the ideas and ideologies constituting the basis of the UN.

The British historians Mark Mazower and Dan Plesch have initiated interesting debates

about the origins and thus, implicitly, the very nature of the United Nations organization. Here, two main questions shall guide us: To what extent do we have to contest the narrative that the creation of the United Nations in 1945 constituted a radical shift in world history? And secondly, did the UN rather perpetuate colonial ideas or was it, in contrast, designed to end colonialism?

While Plesch argues that 1942 was the birth date of the United Nations, Mazower

observes some continuity since the early twentieth century and the League of Nations. Both authors approach the subject quite differently: Dan Plesch provides an archive-based narrative of a UN already established during the war, and Mazower illustrates the ideological origins of the organization with the intellectual setting of its leading figures. Mazower looks at specific persons he considers as key figures: The South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, the English internationalist Sir Alfred Zimmern, the Jewish emigrants Joseph Schechtman and Raphael Lemkin, and last but not least the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In contrast to Mazower, who in comparison rather tends to neglect the most obvious documents and meetings, Plesch focuses very much on the Atlantic Charter (1941), the talks at Dumbarton Oaks (1944), as well as the conferences in Yalta and San

Francisco (1945) that led finally to the establishment of the United Nations organization.

User Avatar

Wiki User

11y ago

What else can I help you with?