Founding of the United Nations
The United Nations was conceived at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference (Washington DC, August–October 1944) and its Charter was finalised at the San Francisco Conference (United Nations Conference on International Organization, April–June 1945) attended by 50 nations. The UN's founding principles reflected the lessons of the League of Nations' failure: the League had lacked both American membership and the great-power authority to enforce its decisions. The UN addressed the first by placing its headquarters in New York and ensuring American participation; it addressed the second by creating the Security Council with five permanent members (the US, UK, USSR, China, and France) who each held a veto over substantive decisions. The veto was the UN's most consequential institutional design choice. It guaranteed that the great powers would join, since none would accept being outvoted by smaller states on questions of their own security. It also guaranteed that the UN could not act effectively against the interests of any permanent member — a structural limitation that became apparent almost immediately as the Cold War made US-Soviet cooperation impossible. The Security Council was paralysed on major questions for most of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the UN system produced significant achievements: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Genocide Convention (1948), the Refugee Convention (1951), WHO and its global health campaigns (including smallpox eradication in 1980), peacekeeping operations in dozens of conflicts, and the decolonisation process which the UN General Assembly accelerated. The UN's relationship to actual international security decisions was often marginal: NATO, Warsaw Pact, and bilateral alliances did the actual security work. The UN's value was primarily normative — it established the vocabulary, norms, and forums through which states argued about international behaviour, and the very act of public justification before the Security Council constrained some actions that might otherwise have been taken silently.
- Year: 1945 CE
- Category: Political
