In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Four Powerful Ideas and the Early Years • The UN’s Wartime Origins • San Francisco and the Charter • Human Rights and Self-Determination • Three Pioneering Reports on Development: Measures for Full Employment Measures for Economic Development Measures for International Economic Stability • Criticisms The United Nations (UN) was born in San Francisco in ,just as the deadliest and most destructive war in recorded history was coming to an end. Rising from the ashes of destruction and despair came four powerful sets of ideas. • Peace—the idea that sovereign states could create an international organization and procedures that would replace military aggression and war by negotiations and collective security. • Independence—the idea that peoples in all countries had rights to be politically independent and sovereign and make whatever national and international agreements that their citizens might choose. • Development—the idea that all countries, long independent or newly so, could purposefully pursue policies of economic and social advance, which over time would rapidly improve the welfare and living standards of their populations. • Human Rights—the boldest idea of all, namely, that every individual in every country throughout the world shared an equal claim not only to such individual civil and political rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but also to a core of more collective economic and social freedoms. The breathtaking nature of these four ideas was,and remains,remarkable.Each of course had predecessors including Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, the Dec16 Emmer 01 (16-42) FINAL 3/5/01 11:08 AM Page 16 laration of Independence, the New Deal, and the  Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The gestation period for ideas, as we have underlined in the introduction, is long. The four big ideas were explicit or implicit in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points at Versailles.1 In one or more essential respects, however, each of the four powerful sets of ideas represented important advances from historical precedents and national and international norms and institutions of the period. Even more remarkable was the political willingness to set in motion a new era based on such thinking in relationship to most thinking and expectations at the time. At this point, it is customary for the reader to pause, sigh, and utter a deep “but.” But what about the Cold War, and what about the more than  smaller wars around the world since ? But what about the egregious record of human rights violations over five decades, and the many moves to independence that ended in brutal dictatorship? But what about the failures of development that have left the world,at the opening of the new millennium,with widening gaps in wealth and income and half the global population having to survive on incomes equivalent to less than two dollars a day? Facts are facts, failures are failures. These tragic events are part of the record. There will be no attempt to airbrush them away. But there is a positive side to the balance sheet—important successes as well as failures. Indeed, the successes are more than many people realize and certainly more than many dared hope at the time when the San Francisco Conference on International Organization was convened and during the early years of the United Nations. Since  there has been no world war. Although military spending has broken all records and tens of thousands of nuclear weapons still threaten the survival of the human race, deaths from war since  have been markedly fewer than those in the first half of the twentieth century. In spite of the Cold War— indeed, because it was mostly cold rather than hot—barely a fifth of the twentieth century’s  million war-related deaths have taken place in the fifty-five years since the UN’s creation.2 The end of colonization and the achievement of sovereign independence came within a decade or two, although in  many observers expected that the decolonization process could take up to a century. Today  countries belong to the United Nations,compared with the fifty-one original member states.About threequarters of these countries now have governments chosen through multi-party elections. Only a handful had done so in . Economic and social development has been impressive in many instances. In developing countries, average life expectancy has increased to double the estimated level of the late s.Child mortality has been lowered by more than threequarters . Adult literacy has been raised to nearly three-quarters, with basic Four Powerful Ideas 17 Emmer...

Share