The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations - Softcover

Kennedy, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375703411 ISBN 13: 9780375703416

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007

Synopsis

The Parliament of Man is the first definitive history of the United Nations, from one of America's greatest living historians.Distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy, author of the bestselling The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, gives us a thorough and timely account that explains the UN's roots and functions while also casting an objective eye on its effectiveness and its prospects for success in meeting the challenges that lie ahead. Kennedy shows the UN for what it is: fallible, human-based, often dependent on the whims of powerful national governments or the foibles of individual administrators—yet also utterly indispensable. With his insightful grasp of six decades of global history, Kennedy convincingly argues that "it is difficult to imagine how much more riven and ruinous our world of six billion people would be if there had been no UN."

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Kennedy is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Preparing for the Twenty-first Century and The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which has been translated into more than twenty languages. He serves on the editorial board of numerous scholarly journals and has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and several other publications. Educated at Newcastle University and Oxford University, he is a former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University and of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in Bonn.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Kennedy: THE PALIAMENT OF MAN

PART 1

The Origins
CHAPTER 1

The Troubled Advance to a New World Order, 1815–1945

The idea of a universal association of humankind goes back hundreds if not thousands of years. Some works claim that ancient Chinese philosophers or Greek sages were arguing even then for the establishment of a world order. Others suggest that Catholic theologians in the Middle Ages proposed some form of universal governance, no doubt Christian in construction but reaching out to all peoples. All sorts of institutional and scholarly names are tossed out here: the federation of Greek city-states, the Stoics, various disciples of Confucius, Dante, William Penn, the Abbé de St.-Pierre with his “Project to Render Peace Perpetual in Europe” (1713), the American founding fathers in their pursuit of a “more perfect union,” and then, perhaps especially, the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace of 1795. The list is long; later, even Lenin wrote in favor of “the United States of Europe,” while H. G. Wells and Arnold Toynbee pleaded for a new international system of affairs.1

It comes as no surprise that most of these texts were composed near the end of, or shortly after, a great and bloody war. They were efforts to find a way out of the international anarchy, to escape the repeated struggles between cities, monarchies, and states, and to establish long-lasting peace. All of them sought to constrain selfish, sover- eign power, usually by some form of league of nations that would take action against a country that broke the existing order. The mechanisms were therefore reactive, assuming humankind’s propensity to conflict but trusting that such dangerous drives could be headed off. They were devices to chain national egoism; as St.-Pierre argued, all members must be placed in a “mutual state of dependence.” From this negative intent there would flow positive benefits: global harmony, rising prosperity, the pursuit of the arts, and so on.

To say that this was idealist would be a gross understatement.We might note that Kant’s great treatise was composed just a few years before Napoleon began his rampage across Europe, leaving damaged and raped communities everywhere. Nonetheless, these early writings contained ideas that would not go away. They were ideas, moreover, that formed a central part of the intellectual architecture of the Enlightenment, the rise of the free trade movement, and the advance of Western liberalism. There was, to be sure, no real move toward a universal monarchy in the early nineteenth century, nor toward any parliament of man. Indeed, the only international structure at that time was the rather informal Concert of Europe, run by the five Great Powers, which was usually conservative in hue. However, since each of those powers was reluctant to risk another expensive and potentially destabilizing war, a general peace obtained.2

Despite that conservatism, there also existed an urge toward the more liberal conduct of affairs, especially in Western Europe and the United States. Advocates of perpetual peace may not have had their hopes fulfilled (there were many smaller wars outside of Europe in the decades following 1815, and revolutionary movements within the Continent were usually crushed), but reformers applauded the news of the increasing legislation against slavery and the slave trade, the emancipation of Catholics in Britain and of Jews in France and the Habsburg Empire, and the reduction or elimination of protectionist tariffs such as the Corn Laws—not because any single change was of itself transforming, but because collectively they comprised movement in the direction of greater peace, tolerance, and interdependence. Tennyson, in the flush of composing “Locksley Hall,” was not alone in his optimism about humankind’s capacity for progress. He was preceded, joined, and followed by some of the greatest names in the Western liberal tradition—Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, Comte, and Mill—as well as by his great contemporary and former classmate, the later prime minister William Gladstone, who with like-minded politicians sought to turn these notions into practice.

In such progressive yet pragmatic fashion, the nineteenth century thus witnessed a series of measures, both legal and commercial, that, it was hoped, would move the world away from international anarchy. The coming of free trade to Britain, later championed across Europe by its ardent disciple Richard Cobden, was hailed not just as an act of economic liberalization, but as a bonding together of peoples, their mutual dependency preventing future war. The creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (1864) was recognition of the need to treat prisoners of war fairly and a signal advance in “the laws of war”; it was, arguably, the first treaty-bound international organization. By century’s end, the two Hague peace conferences (1899 and 1907) would codify the treatment of civilians and neutrals in wartime and provide a mechanism for the peaceful settlement of disputes.3 Meanwhile, the technical innovations that fascinated Tennyson and his fellow Victorians continued apace. The laying of the first submarine cable between Britain and the United States was hailed by both governments as a bond of harmony; the Universal Postal Union provided a similar bond; and the free flow of capital across the globe was praised as if it were the lubricant to ease the world’s troubles and bring prosperity to all. In John Maynard Keynes’s gorgeous description, a gentleman before 1914 “could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country without passport or other formality, could dispatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself much aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement.”4

Yet, as the great economist would readily have conceded, there were other, more daunting elements within the international system. The first was that it remained in essence a European-centered pentarchy, right up until the 1890s; and when Japan and the United States joined the club at the end of the nineteenth century, it simply shifted a little to become a septarchy. The Great Powers still did bilateral or multilateral deals. The Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), for example, whereby Teddy Roosevelt brokered an end to the Russo- Japanese War, seemed more an affirmation of the old order than a harbinger of any new way of dealing with such matters, despite the award to him, as a result, of the Nobel Peace Prize. Second, advancing cosmopolitan tendencies did not stop the larger nations from their most massive bout of colonization, in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific; 1870–1914 was the age when the “North” really did take over the “South.” International civil society was thus confined to the Western nations, the British dominions, Japan, and the independent states of Latin America; it would remain so until the late 1940s. Subjugated to imperial rule, other peoples remained excluded.

Nor did growing international integration prevent the biggest armaments buildup in history up to that time. The Prussian army’s decisive defeats of the Habsburg Empire in 1866 and of France in 1870 spurred an anxious reform of all armies, both qualitatively and quantitatively—conscription of millions of men in peacetime became the norm, except within the Anglo-American nations. Defense spending soared to dizzying heights. Following Otto von Bismarck’s initial and secret contract with Vienna in 1879, the Great Powers began to assemble into combinations, each of which was pledged to war if an ally was threatened. In parallel with the military buildups, there was the proliferation of naval “races”—the Royal Navy against the French and Russian navies, the rise of the American and Japanese fleets, the Anglo-German antagonism across the North Sea. Truly, the era from 1871 to 1914 was a bizarre and puzzling one, with great and increasing evidence of international integration existing side by side with ethnic-nationalist passions, warmongering, and social Darwinist notions about the primacy of struggle. In many regards it is not unlike today’s world, where theories about the rise of new Asian superpowers and growing awareness of the possibility of a terrorist cataclysm jostle with evidence of the ever greater globalization and interdependence of all peoples.

This contest between “merchants and warriors” was won by the latter, decisively, in August 1914.5 Sparked by an assassination and a long-standing conflict in the Balkans, which then escalated through the alliance system across most of Europe, the Great Powers marched to war, as traditionally they had done, in defense of perceived national interests. Bankers like the Rothschilds were dismayed beyond measure; generals everywhere were confirmed in their beliefs. There was no parliament of man, only the god of Mars.

But this war was different from that of 1870 or even the hegemonic struggle of 1793–1815. World War I fatefully combined international anarchy on the one hand and modern mass industrialized warfare on the other. The losses of human life, along the western front, the Isonzo, and the eastern front, in the Balkans, the Atlantic, and Mesopotamia, were beyond all measure and comprehension. When, for example, the British army retired, bloodied and hurt, at the end of the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, it had taken nearly sixty thousand casualties, around twenty thousand fatal. (To give some perspective, U.S. forces’ losses in more than twenty-five years’ fighting in Vietnam were around fifty-eight thousand.) This mutual leaching of the strength and manhood of all the combatant nations had immense consequences, unintended by the decision makers of 1914 who had disregarded the warnings of prewar liberals that modern industrial conflict would shake the pillars of Western life and society. The war shifted the balance of economic power across the Atlantic and undermined Europe’s hegemony. It led to the collapse of the Hohenzollern, Romanov, and Habsburg empires and to the creation of myriad successor states. It transformed the Middle East. It advanced Japan’s claims in the Pacific and Far East. It allowed the Bolshevik Revolution and boosted the tendencies toward Fascism elsewhere in Europe.

The war also led, in almost equal measure, to unexpected and radical domestic consequences. It furthered the cause of labor, since modern warfare could not function without the recruitment of the masses. It advanced the liberation of women, at least in the West, since they, too, could not be recruited without trade-offs. It encouraged the growth of the welfare state, since politicians on all sides promised their warring proletariats “a home fit for heroes.” It increased the Exchequer’s penetration into the economy, since this total war called for vastly increased expenditures, and vastly increased taxes, upon virtually everything that moved or stayed still. The First World War, in a nutshell, created the modern age.6

This catastrophe stimulated, as a reaction, the revival of the Tennysonian idea that humankind simply had to bring their nations together before they destroyed the world. Within a year or so of the first battles, individuals in various countries—Lord Robert Cecil in Britain, Léon Bourgeois in France, the South African general Jan Smuts, President Woodrow Wilson, and his adviser Colonel Edward House—drafted schemes for a postwar organization of states that would prevent any future conflagration, through structures of con- sultation and arbitration. The victory of the Allied Powers in No- vember 1918 allowed those ideas to become the matter for serious political negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference (it is doubtful if the victory of Wilhelmine Germany would have led to talks leading to world organization). The result was the Covenant of the League of Nations, a treaty whose clauses laid out a set of rules and procedures that League members pledged to observe in the pacific settlement of all future disputes. Every sovereign nation, large or small (except for a while the defeated Central Powers), could register for membership and participate in the deliberations and decisions of this new body.

While contemporaries marveled at the revolutionary and unprecedented nature of the League, with Wilson in particular praising the arrrival of a new international setup, it is important to notice the extent to which the Covenant built upon the nineteenth-century Concert system rather than replacing it. The committee that drafted the Covenant consisted of representatives of the five victor powers (the British Empire, France, the United States, Italy, and Japan), joined by some smaller states. Essentially, though, this critical document was the work of Wilson and House on the one hand and Cecil and Smuts on the other. All were for a more open and inclusive international order, but none intended to rock the boat. Inis Claude, the great historian of the United Nations, puts it beautifully and wryly:

[The founders of the League] accepted the independent sovereign state as a basic entity, the great powers as the predominant participants, and Europe as the central core of the world political system. They felt no sense of failure or inadequacy when they created a League which did not represent a fundamental alteration of the old system, since they regarded that system as basically sound and workable. World War I was to them not an indication that war is the typical and necessary result of the existence of sovereign states, but a warning that accidents can happen. The task to which they set themselves was that of creating safety devices to obviate the repetition of such an unfortunate breakdown as had occurred in 1914.7

Thus, there would be an Assembly of all the (noncolonized) nations of the globe, but its meetings in neutral Geneva would be occasional, and real weight would lie with the Council of the League of Nations, whose nine members automatically included the five victor powers, the other four seats being for rotating members, usually elected on a regional basis. The world system had indeed advanced from the mere pentarchy of states that ran the show after 1814; yet the League’s arrangements, like those that emerged from the San Francisco conference in 1945, were a compromise between the more egalitarian instincts of the smaller and medium-size nations and the claims to privilege of the powerful few—with the latter having the upper hand.

Nevertheless, this was the closest the world community had come to creating a parliament of man, and its proceedings generated much excitement and hope throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. It was only later that the view developed that the League experiment had been worthless. In its early stages, though, the optimism seemed justified. Here, for the first time in the history of humankind, there existed an international organization, with headquarters in a settled neutral state, which was committed to ways of solving problems through peaceful means and thus avoiding the recourse to war. Much of the world was to be fascinated at the regular and extraordinary meetings in Geneva, and many rejoiced at the promise it offered. Small states especially—such as Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland, and Colombia—felt that at last they had some place at high table.

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About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0375703411
• ISBN 13: 9780375703416
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384