CHAPTER 9
ONE WORLD
Brian Urquhart, the young British army intelligence officer mentioned earlier in this book, the man who had been told to go on sick leave after he alerted his superior officers to the colossal risks of dropping Allied forces near the Dutch town of Arnhem in September 1944, could easily have ended up as a cynic. Operation Market-Garden, costing thousands of young lives, went ahead anyway. “Monty” wanted to outshine his American rival, General George Patton, no matter what. A little more than six months later, already disillusioned by the arrogant stupidity of his own side, Urquhart was among the first Allied soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen. First, the idiocy, then the horror. When the war was finally over, he could not summon up much joy.
And yet, somehow, he avoided the trap of cynicism. He recalled in his memoir: “I did not meditate that things would never be the same. I hadn’t had too much experience of the old order and did not feel I would miss it. I did think that the greatest task at hand would be to help prevent such disasters from ever happening again.”1
Before the war, Urquhart had been excited by the League of Nations. His internationalist enthusiasm had been inspired, he recalls, by his childhood connection to a private girls’ boarding school, Badminton, run by an eccentric headmistress named Miss Beatrice M. Baker, known to all as BMB. Urquhart’s mother taught at Badminton School. His aunt Lucy was the formidable BMB’s partner, in the school and in life. At the age of six, Urquhart was the only little boy among more than two hundred girls. BMB’s sympathies were very much on the left. Like many people at the time, she took a benign view of “Uncle Joe” Stalin. BMB also took in Jewish refugees from the Continent during the 1930s, not something most private boarding school headmistresses would have done at the time. She even made her girls, including my mother, who was a pupil during the war, march through the streets of Bristol under banners that read “Workers of the World Unite!”
After the war was over, Urquhart was briefly taken on by the historian Arnold Toynbee in a special department at the Foreign Office set up to gather intelligence from Nazi-occupied Holland. Since Holland was no longer under Nazi occupation, there was nothing much to do—a small example of the many bureaucratic oddities left over from the war. This assignment didn’t last long, however. Urquhart’s next employer was Gladwyn Jebb, the British diplomat in charge of organizing the recently established United Nations, whose charter he helped draft. For the rest of his professional life, Urquhart remained a loyal servant of that world institution whose ideals continued to move him, even as he viewed its flaws in practice with due skepticism.
Four decades later he wrote of that heady time in the fall of 1945:
. . . it is hard to recapture the freshness and enthusiasm of those pioneering days. The war was still vivid in everyone’s mind and experience. Many of us had been in the armed forces, and others had only emerged from underground resistance movements a few months before. To work for peace was a dream fulfilled, and the fact that everything had to be organized from scratch was an additional incentive.2
One of Urquhart’s closest friends in the UN secretariat was another man mentioned before, the French resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel, who was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo before being sent to Buchenwald and Dora. He was born in 1919, the same year as Urquhart. Hessel, too, had an unusual background. His father, Franz Hessel, a distinguished German writer and translator of Proust, was the model for Jules in Jules et Jim, the story of a fatal Franco-German love triangle, later made into the famous film by Fran?ois Truffaut. Like Urquhart, Stéphane Hessel wanted to build a better world on a global stage. His ambition was spurred by something more remarkable than the usual loathing of war and longing for peace. He wrote in his memoir that it was “the cosmopolitanism of the concentration camps,” where men from many nations and classes were thrown together, that “pushed me towards diplomacy.”3 Three years after the end of the war, he helped to draft the first Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted in 1948). Hessel died in 2013, at the age of ninety-five.
No doubt, Urquhart and Hessel were extraordinary men. But their idealism, born from the experience of devastation, was not out of the ordinary. The idea that a new world order had to be built, governed by a global organization, more robust and effective than the League of Nations, was widely believed. Some took this notion very far. Even before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, proponents of world government often spoke in apocalyptic terms. Arnold Toynbee’s pronouncements during the war that a Third World War could be prevented only by a world government, with a worldwide police force, would seem to be on the zany side, but he was taken seriously enough by senior figures in the U.S. State Department. A Gallup poll taken in April 1945 revealed that 81 percent of Americans wanted the U.S. to enter “a world organization with police power to maintain world peace.”4
Since the concept of world government or world federation was quite vague, thinkers along these lines tended to project their personal ideals on the future. Mahatma Gandhi, not surprisingly, held that a world federation should be based on his principles of nonviolence. Toynbee argued that the worldwide police force, at least for some time to come, should be an Anglo-American operation. The idea was to create a “democratic Anglo-American World Commonwealth.”5 He was not alone. Lord Lothian, the ambassador to Washington in 1939, saw the British Empire as the model for a federal world government. This, too, might strike one as not only self-serving but utterly fanciful. Yet the idea of a kind of liberal Anglo-Saxon hegemony was not unusual in Britain or the U.S. Churchill believed in it for a while. Indeed, the notion still pops up on occasion to feed the self-esteem of English-speaking dreamers, including one or two occupants of the White House.
The New Yorker writer E. B. White commented in that magazine that San Francisco was just the right place for a conference to draft the first United Nations Charter in the spring of 1945. After all, he said, the “United States is regarded by people everywhere as a dream come true, a sort of world state in miniature.”6 If this kind of smugness feels rather stale today, it, too, has not totally vanished. Even so, E. B. White was quite aware of certain blemishes on the American dreamscape. He noted on May 5, a week after the San Francisco Conference had begun, that somewhere in California “a group of preservationists (we saw by the papers) were attempting to restrict residence in a certain area to ‘people of the Caucasian race.’”7
Then there were the Europeans, often in the anti-Nazi, antifascist resistance, who saw European unity as the first step towards a united world. Already in 1942, the French resistance group Combat (also known as the Mouvement de Libération Nationale [MLN]) published a manifesto declaring that “The United States of Europe—a stage on the road to world union—will soon be a living reality for which we are fighting.”8 One of the main figures in Combat was Albert Camus, not a man usually given to hyperbole. He was later in close touch with another group of antifascist resisters who issued a manifesto for European unity even earlier, in 1941, from the tiny volcanic island of Ventotene, off the coast of Naples, where Altiero Spinelli and other Italian leftists were incarcerated by Mussolini in a bleak eighteenth-century prison built by the Bourbons. The so-called Ventotene Manifesto, written by one of the prisoners, the political thinker Ernesto Rossi, declared that national politics was for reactionaries, and all progressives should struggle for “a solid international state.” First a federal Europe, then a federal world.
The ideal of a united Europe is much older, of course, going at least as far back as the Holy Roman Empire in the ninth century. Since then the European ideal went through many changes, but there were two constant themes. One was the ideal of a unified Christendom, with Europe as the spiritual and political core. This goal would remain popular among Catholics—Erasmus for one—and especially French Catholics. Maximilien de Béthune, the duke de Sully (1560–1641), for example, conceived of a Christian European republic which the Turks could join only if they converted to the Christian faith.
The related ideal was eternal peace. In 1713, another Catholic Frenchman, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, published his “Project for the Creation of Eternal Peace in Europe.” There would be a European senate, a European army, and the larger member-states would have equal voting rights.
Eternal peace and Christian unity were often identical in the minds of early pan-Europeanists. Peaceful unification was a religious notion, a Christian utopia. Not necessarily meant to be confined to the European continent, it was, like Christianity itself, a universalist aspiration. National borders, ideally, should be abolished in the earthly kingdom of God.
After the Enlightenment, a new version of this religious universalism was adopted by rationalists with only minor rhetorical changes. The French nineteenth-century poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine wrote a rationalist ode to European unity titled the “Marseillaise of Peace” (1841): “In the course of enlightenment, the world rises to unity / I am the fellow citizen of every thinking person / Truth is my country.” As foreign minister of France in the revolutionary year of 1848, Lamartine published a Manifesto for Europe, promoting the French Republic as a model not just for Europe, but for all mankind.
A similar switch from religious to rationalist idealism took place at the end of World War II. In 1940, before the U.S. had even joined the war, an outfit called the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America set up a commission to work on a “Just and Durable Peace”—a bit premature, perhaps, but always a subject worth pursuing. Protestant ministers and laymen were sometimes joined by Jews and Catholics in this endeavor. “National missions on world order” were established in major U.S. cities. The need for a world organization was set out in a statement by the commission called the “Six Pillars of Peace.” Lest anyone suspect the statement was the work of idle dreamers, the chairman of the commission was John Foster Dulles, an admirer of Hitler in the early 1930s and a fierce cold warrior in the 1950s when he served as Eisenhower’s secretary of state.
Dulles played a major role in some very shabby, not to say morally dubious, policies: he supported the French colonial war against the Vietminh nationalists, and he also helped to bring down the democratically elected Iranian government of premier Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953. Mosaddeq was regarded as soft on communism and a threat to Anglo-American oil interests. A coup, engineered by British agents and the CIA, led by Dulles’s brother Allen, was the result. But Dulles’s anticommunism was not only dictated by corporate business. He was a Christian moralist who believed that the war against godless communism was above all a moral enterprise. He also claimed to believe in what he called the “moral power” of the United Nations, and acted as an adviser to the U.S. delegation in San Francisco.9 His response to the use of atomic bombs against Japan might seem unusual, not just for the time, but for a man associated with American conservatism, but it was not untypical of him: “If we, as a professedly Christian nation, feel morally free to use atomic energy in that way, men elsewhere will accept that verdict.”10
It was indeed the devastation of Hiroshima that changed “one world” rhetoric from something that was often inspired by religious morality to something more secular, and immediate. Scientists were among the first to warn about the implications of a weapon some of them had helped to create. The fearsome explosion of the first atomic bomb in the desert of New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, even prompted a quasi-religious response from Robert Oppenheimer, a leading figure in developing the bomb. He quoted words from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita:
If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . .
Now, I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.
Einstein’s first words on hearing about the bombing of Hiroshima were more prosaic: “Oh, weh!”11
Two months later, Einstein cosigned a letter to the New York Times, along with such prominent figures as Senator J. W. Fulbright and Owen J. Roberts, associate justice of the Supreme Court. They wrote, “The first atomic bomb destroyed more than the city of Hiroshima. It also exploded our inherited, outdated political ideas.”12 These ideas included national sovereignty. The United Nations Charter agreed upon in San Francisco was just a beginning, they proclaimed: “We must aim at a Federal Constitution of the world, a working world-wide legal order, if we hope to prevent another atomic war.”
John Foster Dulles had argued for UN control of nuclear energy, before he changed his mind fast once the Soviet Union exploded its own bomb. Einstein, in an interview published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1945, thought that the “secret of the bomb should be committed to a World Government, and the United States should immediately announce its readiness to give it to a World Government.”
The case for moral reason was perhaps made most succinctly by that old Christian socialist, the British prime minister, Clement Attlee, in a speech to the Canadian houses of parliament in the same month that Einstein’s interview appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Speaking partly in French, and very much with Hiroshima in mind, Attlee proposed that science and morality had to be brought into harmony. He believed, as the Times of London reported, “that without a moral enthusiasm equal to that which savants bring to their researches, the civilization built over the centuries would be destroyed.”13
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THE WAY THE ACTUAL WORLD was beginning to be remade in 1945 might have owed something to the high-minded idealism of former resistance fighters and soldiers for peace, shocked scientists and Christian one-worlders, but not nearly as much as they might have wished. What shaped international institutions after the war (and, in fact, already during the war) was not so much religion or moral ideals, as politics. Since political solutions are never ideal, the new order was bound to be imperfect.
The origin of the UN Charter that would be worked out in San Francisco was a meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt in Placentia Bay, off the coast of Newfoundland, in August 1941. Britain had survived in the Battle of Britain, if only just. Germany had just invaded the Soviet Union, on June 22, and Pearl Harbor was soon to come (December 7, 1941). Roosevelt was keen to nudge American voters gently towards accepting a more active U.S. role in the European conflict. And so the two leaders arrived on their respective battleships, Roosevelt on the USS Augusta, Churchill on HMS Prince of Wales, to draft an “Atlantic Charter.”
Curiously, it was Churchill who was keen to include mention of a future world organization in the Charter. Roosevelt, disillusioned by the failure of the League of Nations and nervously aware of domestic resistance to international entanglements, struck out Churchill’s suggestion. Nor was Roosevelt keen on British imperialism, although he did believe, in line with Toynbee, that Britain and the U.S. should jointly police the world for some years. Roosevelt invoked his “Four Essential Human Freedoms,” first announced to the world in January of that same year, as the reasons for fighting fascism. They were immortalized in the sentimental illustrations of Norman Rockwell: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.
The Atlantic Charter, in fact, turned out to be little more than an elaboration of these fine principles. But one clause did have a significant and long-lasting impact. It was very much the work of the Americans. Not only did the Charter express “the hope that self-government may be restored to those from whom it has been forcibly removed.” It went further: “the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live” would be respected as well.14
News of this aspiration immediately got through to those who were fighting to be free from colonial empires. Nationalist leaders such as Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Sukarno in Indonesia would quote the words of the Atlantic Charter over and over in their demands for political independence—and for U.S. support. The Algerian protesters in Sétif, who were gunned down on May 8 by French settlers for demanding equality, carried banners that read: “Long Live the Atlantic Charter!”
Jawaharlal Nehru, in prison for “civil disobedience” when the Atlantic Charter was drawn up, sensed hypocrisy in the Anglo-American pronouncements; he dismissed the Charter as a set of pious platitudes. But in his “Quit India” campaign of the following year, Nehru echoed the Charter’s call for national self-determination. He also called for a “world federation” that would guarantee such rights.
Churchill had to move fast to reassure Parliament that the right to “self-government” referred only to nations under Nazi occupation. The colonies were an entirely different matter. After all, as he famously remarked in 1942, he had “not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Roosevelt had no time for this kind of bluster, and was sympathetic to Nehru, but did not want to push Churchill too hard while there was still a war on. Churchill, for his part, resented being “school-marmed” by the U.S. on imperial affairs, since the U.S. itself had anything but clean hands, notably in the Philippines. This was true enough, but Churchill forgot to mention that the U.S. had already promised independence to the Philippines before the war, a process that was interrupted by the Japanese invasion.
From the Atlantic Charter, it was but a short step to the United Nations, albeit not yet as a world organization for global security, but as an alliance against the Axis Powers. Twenty-six nations, including China and the Soviet Union, signed up for it in January 1942. Despite his earlier reservations about international organizations, it was Roosevelt who gave the alliance its name, just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Churchill, in a very fine mood, was visiting the White House for a conference code-named “Arcadia.” Roosevelt had been thinking about what to call the new worldwide alliance. Then, before breakfast one day, inspiration hit. Barging into Churchill’s bathroom, he shouted at the prime minister, who was still dripping from his bath: “The United Nations!” And Churchill said it was good.
The main question, worked on all through the war by bureaucrats, planners, diplomats, and the Allied leaders, was how to transform the wartime alliance into a stable postwar international order for peace. How to avoid another worldwide economic slump. How to stop future Hitlers from starting another world war. And how to do this without stirring up American conservatives, who were quick to brand such international enterprises as the dark doings of “communists.” Whatever the new world organization would look like (Churchill still thought in terms of the “English-speaking peoples,” Stalin of “peace-loving” peoples, and Roosevelt of a harmonious Big Power coalition), it had to have real clout. For that was precisely what the old League of Nations had lacked. The new UN would need the capacity to impose peace, by force if necessary. To assert such authority effectively, the major powers had to get along, hence the conferences in Moscow, Teheran, and Yalta, where the postwar order was thrashed out, sometimes on the back of envelopes, by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, making their moves as though the world were a giant chessboard, with Poles, Greeks, and other peoples, pushed around like pawns.
In the U.S., meanwhile, new international bodies were created to deal with humanitarian aid and food shortages in the countries ruined by war. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was formed in 1943, an organization Churchill, at first, found hard to take seriously. Once again in his bathroom, he was heard to sing “UNRRA!, UNRRA!, UNRRA!” as though it were a music hall turn. After the war, UNRRA was inevitably accused by Republicans in the United States of being soft on communism. There was some reason for this: since western European governments were deemed to be able to take care of their own problems, much of the relief went to eastern European countries and Soviet republics, where the spoils tended to go to political favorites. UNRRA was often a shambolic enterprise, especially in the early stages, and yet without it many more people would have perished in dreadful conditions.
By the time Stalin’s Red Army was driving back the exhausted Germans across the icy plains of the Ukraine and the Western Allies had secured their beachheads at Normandy, the Big Powers had a rough idea what the future UN organization would look like. It would have a General Assembly, and a Security Council controlled by the Big Powers themselves. Economic cooperation to defeat Germany—Lend-Lease, and so on—provided the basis for an international monetary system, with international rules to contain the excesses of economic nationalism and noxious forms of speculation. And there would be an International Court of Justice.
The monetary system was set up in 1944 at a resort hotel in New Hampshire named Bretton Woods. The meeting, formally titled the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, was held at Bretton Woods for two reasons: the New Hampshire senator on the congressional banking and currency committee was a Republican opponent of currency regulation who needed to be brought around, and the hotel accepted Jewish guests, which was not always the case in rural establishments of this sort. It would hardly have done for Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, among others, to be turned away at the door.
In November 1944, Roosevelt won his fourth term as president of the United States. That he was by then fully committed to a postwar UN was obvious from his campaign statements. The world needed a global New Deal, in his view, and the UN needed to be empowered to secure global peace. As he said at the time: “To my simple mind it is clear that, if the world organization is to have any reality at all, our American representatives must be endowed in advance by the people themselves, by constitutional means through their representatives in Congress, with authority to act.”15 Even though the voices that associated Roosevelt and his ideals with “communism” had not been stilled, most American citizens now appeared to agree with him.
Just before Roosevelt’s fourth election, there had been one more conference on the UN, held discreetly at Dumbarton Oaks, a plush estate in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, the so-called Big Three, had decided Allied policies during the war. This time, a Big Fourth, China, was invited to take part as well. These Big Four, it was hoped, would jointly police the postwar world, even though there was limited confidence that China would be able to play its part. Neither Churchill nor Stalin had much respect for Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, but the Americans were very keen to give the Generalissimo face. (Later, in San Francisco, the Big Four became the Big Five, with France in urgent need of face-saving as well.)
There were still disagreements at Dumbarton Oaks, however, about the exact shape of the United Nations. Which countries would be eligible for membership? Should the UN mission confine itself to security (the Soviet position) or also include economic and social affairs, which is what the U.S. wanted (and got)? Should there be an international air force? Who would supply UN troops? Should every member have the right to veto UN actions, as was the case in the League of Nations, or just the Big Powers? Exactly what should be subject to veto—just the actions, or investigations and topics for discussion too? Compromises were struck, and hard questions (the veto) left unresolved. Membership, in principle, would be open to all “peace-loving states,” a phrase that appealed to the sentimental side of the Americans, but meant something more specific to Stalin, who habitually denounced critics of the Soviet Union as enemies of peace. Finland, for example, which had defied the Soviet Red Army in 1940, was an enemy of peace.
And so the stage was set for San Francisco, where, on April 27, 1945, the peace-loving world would unite and the UN be transformed from a wartime alliance to a “democratic organization of the world,” as Roosevelt liked to say.16
Sadly, the president, already gravely ill and fatally exhausted by the conference at Yalta, where, despite the grandeur of the tsar’s old summer palace, conditions were not comfortable (bedbugs were a particular torment), died on April 12. But the new president, Harry S. Truman, actually cranked up expectations for a democratic world order even higher than his predecessor had done. Upon receiving an honorary degree in June from the University of Kansas City, not long before putting his signature to the UN Charter, Truman declared in a burst of Yankee optimism: “It will be just as easy for nations to get along in a republic of the world as it is for us to get along in the republic of the United States.”17
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THE FLAGS OF FIFTY NATIONS snapped in the Pacific breeze, as five thousand delegates arrived, and hundreds of thousands of spectators flooded the streets for the opening ceremony at the San Francisco Opera House. All the world—except Germans, Japanese, and their allies, of course—was there. Or actually, not all the world; there were exceptions. And perhaps not everyone that was there, should have been. Argentina, whose military junta, until the very end of the war, had been distinctly sympathetic to the fascist camp, was invited because of some gamesmanship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The latter wanted the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus to be full members, so the U.S., needing Latin American support, insisted on the inclusion of Argentina.
Poland, on the other hand, the country where World War II began, was not invited, because there was no agreement over a legitimate government. The Soviet Union had sponsored a provisional Polish government, known as the Lublin Committee, while the Polish government-in-exile continued to make its claims from London. As long as this was so, there was no question of inviting the Lublin Committee to San Francisco, as the Soviets wanted. Stalin had assured Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta that Poland would have free elections, and sixteen leaders of the Polish wartime underground had even been invited for a friendly chat with the Russians. That nothing more was heard from these Polish leaders since was ominous. In the words of E. B. White in the New Yorker, “Over the city the Polish question hovered like a foul bird.”18
Still, there was enough optimism to get on with. Arab delegates had a particularly exotic appeal for the local gawpers. According to Yank magazine, “American celebrity hounds jostled one another to look at the Aye-rabs from close up and said, to a man, ‘Sheeks, huh? How about that?’”
And the Arabs responded with similar bafflement. A Mr. Farid Zeineddine of Syria described his impressions to Yank: “The Americans seem to me like a nation of people in spectacles, all chewing gum. Maybe they have to wear spectacles because the buildings are so high and they strain their eyes to see up and down them.”19
Others surveyed the scene with a more acid eye. Michael Foot, the future leader of the British Labour Party, was there as a columnist for the Daily Herald. A good European socialist, he was worried about the “dangers of America’s present status.” The U.S. was simply too rich, too unscathed by war, too powerful. “America’s economic prospects,” he observed, “seem to dwarf the conference itself.” What was more, newsreels shown at local cinemas of the Nazi concentration camps did not, as he put it, “incite to mafficking” (rejoicing, as British crowds did during the Boer War when the siege of Mafeking was lifted).20
Other films in the American cinemas that spring, no doubt aimed at lifting the flagging war spirit in the last months of the Pacific War, were John Wayne’s Back to Bataan, and Objective, Burma! with Errol Flynn. But there was more cheerful entertainment on hand as well, including MGM’s Son of Lassie, Dorothy Lamour in Medal for Benny, and Here Come the Co-Eds with Abbott and Costello.
Accommodations, for which delegates were supposed to pay themselves, were certainly more plush than at Yalta. Gladwyn Jebb, who had attended most wartime conferences, including Yalta, as Churchill’s diplomatic adviser, described the San Francisco experience as “an appalling outbreak of hospitality.”21 The Big Four Powers (soon to be Five), presided over by U.S. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., met in the circular library of a penthouse apartment at the top of the Fairmont Hotel—“with a blue ceiling and two love seats upholstered in green,” in the words of Time magazine.22 The lesser delegations worked on the floors below.
Agreement on general principles came swiftly between the Big Powers. But there were tensions between them and the rest, between the aim of Big Power dominance and a democratic world organization. The smaller countries, represented by the grandiloquent Australian foreign minister, Dr. Herbert Evatt, resented the veto rights of the Big Powers in the Security Council, but they had to give way. The Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, took the most extreme Big Power position. He continued to insist on the right to veto any subject the Soviet Union did not wish to be discussed in the UN. This attitude almost sank the conference, until a U.S. diplomatic mission was sent to Moscow, and Stalin instructed Molotov to back down.
All appeared to be fine, among the Big Three at least, when Molotov organized a lavish banquet for his British and U.S. counterparts, the suave Anthony Eden, and Edward Stettinius, described by Brian Urquhart as “a man with theatrical good looks and unnaturally white teeth.”23 As usual at these Russian affairs, huge amounts of food and drink were consumed. Photographs were taken of the three men toasting one another, in which even the colorless Molotov, known in Soviet Party circles as “Steely Ass” for the long hours spent at his desk, managed to contrive an air of bonhomie. It was getting late. The gentlemen were beginning to feel distinctly woozy.
Then something extraordinary happened. Still in an expansive mood of chummy goodwill, Molotov announced to his esteemed colleagues that he could finally divulge what had happened to the sixteen leaders from the Polish underground. They had been arrested for “diversionist activity” against the Soviet Red Army, a crime that carried the death penalty. Eden, first shocked, then furious, demanded a full explanation. Molotov, ruffled by Eden’s sharp tone, became sullen and defensive. The festive mood instantly evaporated. Once more, the conference was in danger.
This storm, too, blew over, however. Wishful thinking kept reality at bay. American liberals were told by the Nation magazine that once “truly free elections” were held in Poland, “Russia’s moral position” would be “greatly strengthened” and “distrust reduced to a minimum.”24 The vague promise of free elections was the fig leaf, eagerly grasped at by the Western Allies at Yalta, which no one yet wished to throw away. Only the Soviets knew that the sixteen brave Poles who had risked everything by resisting the Germans in the most ghastly conditions had already been tortured by the Soviet secret police and tried as “Nazi collaborators.” They were sentenced on June 21, while the San Francisco conference was still going on. All but two were later murdered in Soviet prisons.
Even as the sixteen Poles were being tortured in Moscow, the Big Powers discussed a declaration on human rights for inclusion in the preamble to the Charter (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came later, in 1948). This noble fruit of Enlightenment thinking, as well as Christian universalism, the idea that human rights should benefit not just one community, defined by faith or culture or political borders, but mankind, was seen by Stéphane Hessel and many others as the greatest contribution of the postwar order. Universal human rights were linked to the law, adopted in Nuremberg, on “crimes against humanity,” which in turn was linked to the concept of genocide, defined in 1944 by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.”
Not that anyone suggested for a minute that human rights would or could be enforced. Quite to the contrary. In the words of a British foreign policy adviser at San Francisco, the historian C. K. Webster, “Our policy is to avoid ‘guarantee of human rights,’ though we might not object to a declaration.”25 And a declaration duly arrived, based on a draft written by General Jan Smuts, the South African statesman and hero of the Boer War, who had assisted at the birth of the League of Nations, as well as of the UN. These were the words decided upon in San Francisco by the Big Powers in June: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined . . . to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small . . .”
Michael Foot, in his column for the Daily Herald, singled out the moral leadership of the Soviet Union for special praise. He pointed out that before the war the British government under Neville Chamberlain had suppressed the news of Nazi atrocities. But then, of course, “the victims were only Liberals, Socialists, Pacifists and Jews.” Nowadays, he observed with a touch of superciliousness, “these types will have the advantage of their rights being included in the preamble of the Charter of Fundamental Freedoms drawn up by General Smuts. This Charter will even apply to black people in South Africa. Or will it?” Foot’s doubts on this score were not unfounded, but he, too, was happy to overlook the foul stench of the Polish question. Indeed, he commended the Soviets for expressing “a far more logical and unequivocal view” on “the political rights of dependent peoples than any other nation.”
There was one more crisis before the Conference reached its conclusion at the end of June. The action, this time, was in the Levant, where on May 29 French troops were fighting Syrians in the streets of Damascus, and dropping bombs, not just on the ancient capital, but on Aleppo, Hama, and Homs. The French had called for reinforcements after Syrian demands that they transfer special Syrian forces under French command to the Syrian national army.
The next day, Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli, a deft diplomatic operator, wrote a letter to President Truman expressing the same sentiments as Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno, though with a much more successful outcome. Here were the French, he wrote in perfectly justified indignation, killing Syrians with weapons bought with money borrowed from the United States to fight the Germans. The United States had recognized Syria as an independent country in 1944. So: “Where now is the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms? What can we think of San Francisco?”26
The Americans needed little encouragement to take the side of the Syrians. European imperialism was not popular in Washington, and French imperialism least of all. Unlike Indochina, which was rather more alien territory to the Americans in those days, Syria and Lebanon had long been regarded with the kind of benevolent paternalism bestowed on the Chinese as well, a mixture of missionary zeal and commercial interest: the American University in Beirut, Christian missions in Jerusalem, an Open Door economic policy. The popular phrase among U.S. policymakers at the time was “moral leadership.” No doubt, as appears to be true of John Foster Dulles, the moral sentiment was sincere, but so was the ambition to lead.
Since the Allies had already promised to recognize postwar Syrian independence when British troops occupied the Levant in 1941, they could hardly ignore Quwatli’s plea now. So Churchill instructed his man on the spot, General Bernard Paget, to drive the French back into their barracks. This was not a difficult task, as the French were far too few in number to resist. The left-leaning Manchester Guardian reported the event with patriotic delight. Its reporter “marched into Damascus with the sailors . . . while crowds of surprised Damascenes clapped their hands . . . The people of Damascus hissed and booed the long line of lorries, tanks, and Bren-gun carriers taking French troops out of the city, escorted by British armored cars . . .”27
General de Gaulle responded with fury to what he saw as a heinous Anglo-Saxon conspiracy: “We are not in a position to open hostilities against you at the present time. But you have insulted France and betrayed the West. This cannot be forgotten.”28
On the surface, the Syrian crisis was the perfect test for the new world order that was being shaped in San Francisco. If ever there was a legitimate case for living up to the words of the Atlantic Charter and the ethos of the UN, this was it. The French, despite promises made in 1941, were trying to restore their colonial authority. The British were quite right to put them in their place, hence the proud tone of the Guardian’s report.
It wasn’t, of course, quite as simple as that. As they had elsewhere in the Middle East, the British played a double game, making different promises to different people. With the end of the Ottoman Empire in sight in 1916, Britain and France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement had carved up the Levant into spheres of interest: France would have the run of Syria and Lebanon while Britain took charge of Transjordan and Iraq. In 1941, a year after France had been defeated by Germany, British forces moved into Damascus, promising to support Syrian independence while recognizing France’s privileged position. These were obviously not compatible aims. In fact, what the British really wanted was to become the major players in the Levant themselves. So they were quite happy to see the Syrians provoke the French. Violent French retaliation was just the excuse needed to kick them out altogether. And this, in effect, is what was happening in the early summer of 1945.
There was something quaintly old-fashioned, indeed redolent of late-nineteenth-century imperial skirmishes, about the Syrian crisis. In any event, though this was not yet clear in San Francisco, Britain and France would both lose their preeminent positions in the Middle East. The United States and the Soviet Union would soon call the shots. One British wartime plan offered a glimpse of the not too distant future. It was hoped in London that Britain and the U.S. would jointly police the postwar world by establishing military bases under the auspices of the UN; the U.S. in Asia, and the British in the Middle East. The Americans had already made it clear that local sovereignty would not stretch to areas selected for U.S. military installations—the so-called strategic trust territories. Already in the first months after the war, the dim shape of a more informal empire was starting to be visible. What the British had not quite realized was how minor their role in this new world was destined to be.
The Syrians were not alone in demanding independence. Indeed this was one of the talking points of San Francisco. And Michael Foot was not wrong to say that the Soviet Union, for its own not strictly philosophical reasons, was more supportive of such aspirations than its western European allies. But, although the General Assembly would, in time, become a vital forum for anticolonial agitation, decolonization was not yet on the agenda in 1945. The most that colonial powers would concede was the promise, enshrined in the UN Charter, to look after “the well-being” of the inhabitants of the “non-self-governing territories.” Self-government would be promoted “according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their various stages of advancement.” The former governor of the Punjab, Baron (William Malcolm) Hailey of Shahpur and Newport Pagnell, could reassure the readers of the London Times that there was “nothing here which is not already implicit in our own policy.” And, more important, there was “clearly no intention that the United Nations Organization should intervene in the application of the principles of the charter by the colonial powers concerned.”29 All that Britain, France, and other imperial powers were obliged to do was to report regularly to the Secretary General of the UN on conditions in the “territories” they continued to possess.
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GIVEN THE HIGH EXPECTATIONS in some quarters for a world government, the final outcome of the San Francisco conference was bound to disappoint. For a world government to work, national governments would have had to give up their sovereign rights. Of the Big Powers, only China, represented by T. V. Soong, business tycoon and politician, talked about “yielding if necessary a part of our sovereignty.”30 China had even been prepared to give up on Big Power veto rights. But since Chiang Kai-shek’s sovereignty in China itself was already looking shaky, Chinese magnanimity in this matter did not cut much ice.
In his dispatches for the New Yorker, E. B. White had put his finger on the main paradox of the conference. He wrote that “the first stirrings of internationalism seem to tend toward, rather than away from, nationalism.”31 He saw in the national flags, the uniforms, the martial music, the secret meetings, the diplomatic moves, “a denial of the world community.” Under all the fine internationalist rhetoric, he heard “the steady throbbing of the engines: sovereignty, sovereignty, sovereignty.”
Another observer in San Francisco was John F. Kennedy, recently discharged from the U.S. Navy. He agreed with the “world federalists” that “world organization with common obedience to law would be the solution.” But he realized that nothing would ever come of this unless the common feeling that war was the “ultimate evil” were strong enough to drive governments together. An unlikely event, in his view.32
Even the dropping of two atomic bombs failed to bring that sentiment about. A week after Nagasaki was devastated, Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, made a speech at a luncheon welcoming Gladwyn Jebb and his UN Executive Committee to London. It was a very high-powered committee. Andrei Gromyko was there for the Soviet Union; Lester Pearson for Canada; Stettinius for the United States, assisted by the tall and dapper Alger Hiss, later to be prosecuted as a Soviet spy. Britain was represented by Philip Noel-Baker, a great believer in internationalism. And the historian C. K. Webster was there to assist him, wearing a tennis visor in protest against photographers’ lights. This excellent committee, said Bevin, would soon complete the work begun in San Francisco. The terrible new weapons dropped on Japan made it all the more imperative that the world organization should work. However, Bevin continued, he recognized that “the idea of world government” would have to be “carefully nurtured.” Nations had histories, collective memories, traditions. All this might be overcome in time, just as he, Ernest Bevin, had managed to overcome his working-class origins. The “basic principle” of San Francisco was right. But it would take time to create “the right atmosphere.” Until then, “cooperation between nations, and notably large ones, who are the greatest influence for good and for ill, is the only practical method which we can adopt.”33
Bevin was right. But without meaning to, he revealed the great defect in the ideal of world government. It depended for its working on an alliance of Big Powers. If the alliance kept together, a kind of global authoritarianism—a repeat of Metternich’s Holy Alliance after Napoleon’s defeat—threatened. If it didn’t, the fledgling world organization would be powerless, and another, perhaps even more devastating war loomed.
In the event, the Big Powers failed to stick together. Exactly when the Cold War began is hard to say. Serious rifts were already apparent at Yalta, no matter how much Roosevelt tried to keep Stalin on his side—to the point of needlessly bullying Churchill. John Foster Dulles did not yet call it the Cold War, but he claimed to have witnessed its birth, in London, at the end of September 1945.
The foreign ministers of the Big Five powers—the United States, Britain, the USSR, France, and China—had gathered there to discuss various peace treaties, notably with Italy, Finland, and the Balkan countries. They did not disagree on anything substantial. Indeed, the U.S., for the sake of harmony in the Big Power alliance, had already agreed to recognize the Soviet-imposed provisional government in Poland without being too fussy about its nature, and was prepared to do the same in the case of Hungary. In his report on the conference, U.S. secretary of state James F. Byrnes stated that his government “shares the desire of the Soviet Union to have governments friendly to the Soviet Union in eastern and central Europe.”34
But Molotov had another agenda. Communism was a major force in two of the Big Powers, apart from the Soviet Union: in France, where the Communist Party was still very powerful, and China, where simmering civil war would soon come to the boil. If Molotov could humiliate the Chinese Nationalists and the French, and implicate the U.S. in their humiliation, the communist cause would be greatly strengthened. His tactic was to demand that France and China withdraw from the treaty discussions, since they had not been signatories to the surrender terms of the relevant countries. The aim was to bully the French, insult the Chinese, and rattle the British. John Foster Dulles, in his memoir, couldn’t help but admire Molotov’s cold-blooded diplomatic skills: “Mr. Molotov at London in 1945 was at his best.”35
The French foreign minister, Georges Bidault, a former leader of the resistance and future president, was constantly slighted, provoked, and humiliated. One of Molotov’s tricks was to ask his British and American colleagues to postpone a meeting without informing Bidault, so the Frenchman would turn up to an empty room. The hope was that Bidault would stomp off to Paris in high dudgeon. The Chinese minister was simply ignored, as though he weren’t in the room at all. And Bevin, who had a temper, was needled into explosions of fury, followed by sheepish apologies that might result in concessions to the Soviet view.
When these tactics failed to have the desired result, the Soviets tried blackmail. Bevin and Byrnes were told that the Soviet Union would no longer cooperate if France and China did not withdraw. Byrnes refused to lend himself to the further humiliation of his allies and the conference was abandoned. To Dulles, this was the moment of truth. It marked “the end of an epoch, the epoch of Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam. It marked the ending of any pretence by Soviet Communists that they were our ‘friends.’ It began the period when their hostility to us was openly proclaimed throughout the world.”36
The old Cold Warrior was surely not wrong about this. And he wasn’t the only one to see cracks appearing in the postwar world order. Hanson W. Baldwin was the military editor of the New York Times, a liberal, unlike Dulles. In a column written for his paper on October 26, he argued that the invention of atomic bombs meant that the world, and the two Big Powers in particular, were faced with a harrowing choice. One was to strengthen the United Nations. Inevitably, in that case, the Big Powers would have to give up a great deal of national sovereignty, and veto power in the Security Council would be abolished. Russians would have the right to inspect American atomic facilities, and vice versa.
This was Baldwin’s own preferred solution, not on moral grounds, but for the sake of self-preservation. Dulles, as always, took a more moralistic view. The UN would always remain weak, he wrote, because there was no worldwide “consensus on moral judgment.”37 To him, the Cold War was a moral as well as a political conflict, a war of good against evil.
Hanson Baldwin was not na?ve, however. He did not expect the Soviets, or the Americans for that matter, to agree to his proposed solution. And that would mean, in his words, “a world divided into two blocs, each suspicious of the other, a world that may be stable for many years, but eventually would trend toward major war.”
So it came to pass. By the time autumn turned to winter, the high hopes of the spring of ’45 were already fading. There would be no world government, let alone a world democracy; there would not even be four or five world policemen. What powers were still left to the two European countries represented in the Security Council would soon be further depleted by the bloody demise of their empires. The Soviets and the United States were drifting into open animosity. And China, a gravely wounded country after Japanese occupation, was itself divided into two blocs, with corrupt and demoralized Nationalists holding out in major cities south of Manchuria, and the Communists dominating the countryside and much of the north.
In the fall and winter of 1945, American newspapers were still reporting on positive developments in the Chinese wartime capital of Chungking, where negotiations between Communists and Nationalists continued as a kind of shadow play. There was talk of “compromise” and “truce” and “democracy,” and the reluctance on both sides to “start” a civil war. In an article published in the New York Times Magazine on October 14, full confidence was expressed in the leadership of the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It makes for very curious reading now: