Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (review)

A world without the United Nations is unknown to most of us. The organization has been with us, for better or for worse, for almost sixty years. Yet few people know much about its creation, and historians to date have largely ignored this story from the recent past. Thankfully, Stephen C. Schlesinger, a foreign affairs historian and Director of the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York, has changed that. His new book, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations, tells the story of the nine weeks in the autumn of 1945 when the world's foreign ministers and statesmen gathered in San Francisco to draft the U.N.'s charter. Schlesinger's historical narrative is magnificently written—succinct, lucid, and well researched. He brilliantly captures the seminal nature of those crucial weeks. Yet the book's three key messages are aimed squarely at those dealing with the contemporary world of international affairs.

The first message is that the U.N. was never intended to be merely a talking shop with no clout, for which it is criticized today. As Schlesinger's account makes clear, its main proponents—Franklin D. Roosevelt and, following his untimely death, Harry Truman—were clear-eyed, hard-headed realists determined to ensure that the U.N. did not meet the same fate as the League of Nations a generation before. Their men on the ground, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius—the chair of the founding conference, and Leo Pasvolsky—the State Department bureaucrat who nurtured the U.N. since its conception in 1939, battled a skeptical Churchill, a recalcitrant Molotov, and many reluctant smaller states during their nine weeks in San Francisco. Their purpose was to create an organization aimed not at governing the world, but at preventing another major war. Thus, the U.N. was designed to respect the sovereignty of the nation-state so long as breaches of the peace or acts of aggression were not committed. In the event that they were committed, the Security Council, comprising the permanent five (United States, Soviet Union, China, France and Britain) and a rotating ten, was to take any necessary actions, including the application of force, to restore security. However, acting on this obligation required cooperation amongst the permanent five. The semblance of any such unity, as Schlesinger lucidly relates, began to fray even in the early months of 1945. Indeed, it disappeared altogether during the Cold War as the United States and the Soviet Union vetoed one another's resolutions. In this respect, the U.N. was stillborn. It never truly had the chance to exercise the powers it was delegated.

Schlesinger's second message highlights the achievements possible when U.S. diplomacy is focused, patient, and accommodating toward the legitimate interests of others. These were the characteristics of the diplomacy of the Truman era, when the United States was at its most powerful, yet still tentative with its mantle as a global leader. Nonetheless, it led the world in establishing the alliance against communism, the U.N., the Marshall Plan, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and NATO, as well as supporting the European Coal and Steel Community (the forerunner to the European Union). This architecture, which has so dominated international politics in the subsequent decades, took time and energy to create. Moreover, as the political horse trading, scheming, and back room deals described so brilliantly by Schlesinger make clear, none of it was easy and not all of the decisions made were favorable to the United States. Yet despite such difficulties, this approach made U.S. objectives legitimate. It made other states a part of the process, and therefore more willing to accept the policies determined and actively work toward mutually desirable outcomes. It is difficult to imagine the United States similarly persevering today, particularly in a post-September 11^th world.

Finally, the regenerative...