Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security

336 Pages·1990·7.02 MB·English

by  Robert C. Hilderbrand

Dumbarton Oaks
Till the war drum throbbed no longer,
and the battle flags were furled
In the ferliament of Man, the Federation
of the \M>rld.
There the common sense of most shall hold
a fretful realm in awe
And the kindly earth shall slumber
Lapt in universal law.
—Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” 1842
Dumbarton Oaks
The Origins of the
United Nations
and the Search for
Postwar Security
by Robert C. Hilderbrand
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill and London
© 1990 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
94 93 92 91 90 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hilderbrand, Robert C, 1947-
Dumbarton Oaks : the origins of the United Nations and the search
for postwar security / by Robert C. Hilderbrand.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8078-1894-1 (alk. paper)
1. Dumbarton Oaks Conference (1944) 2. United Nations.
3. Security, International. I. Title.
JX1976.3.H55 1990
341.23*09—dc20 89-28392
CIP
For Jan

Contents
Preface ix
Introduction: Federation of the World? 1
1 Preparing for Peace 5
2 Preparing for the Conference 30
3 The Conference Begins 67
4
Plans and Principles 85
5 The Assembly and the Court 108
6 The Security Council 122
7 A World of Troubles 159
8 Impasse 183
9 Conflict and Compromise 209
10 Bring on the Chinese 229
Conclusion: Quod Sevens Metes 245
Appendix 258
Notes 261
Bibliography 299
Index 309
A section of illustrations will
be found following page 107.

Preface
In the two generations since its founding in 1945, the United
Nations Organization has come in for harsh criticism. It has disappointed some
of its strongest supporters—and to such a degree that even in the United
States, the nation that served as its historical midwife, there are now many who
doubt whether the birth of a world body was such a good idea in the first place.
The reasons for this disenchantment can be found in newspaper headlines
almost daily: The U.N. has failed to erect a lasting structure for the mainte­
nance of world peace, or even to prevent the postwar Great Powers, which
brought it into existence as a symbol of their continuing cooperation, from
drifting into a state of permanent conflict. Whatever may be said of its genuine
achievements as a force for order and goodwill in a dangerous and troubled
world, the United Nations has not lived up to the larger promises of lasting
peace made at the end of the Second World Wir.
If it is true, as someone has said, that a good way to find out about a people is
to study its dreams, then the citizens of all the Great Powers can take just pride
in the very idea of a United Nations. As originally developed in each of the Big
Four nations, the dream that led to the creation of a new world body was a
vision of lasting peace—a dream of ending, once and for all, mankind’s curse of
war. It was a grand and bold idea, made all the more remarkable by the fact that
it called upon the major nations themselves to behave unselfishly at their
moment of final victory in the Second World Wir. Nor did the early plans for
putting the dream into effect lack strength or imagination. They envisioned a
world where cooperation tempered competition, where power entailed respon­
sibility, where the shared desire for order limited sovereignty. They called for
the prevention of war, when necessary, through the enforcement of peace. We
know that these dreams and the plans they led to have not been realized. The
question we must ask is. Why not?
The answer to this question is not to be found, as the U.N.'s critics seem to
suggest, in the way the organization has developed since 1945. We must go
back further, to the final plans for the world body itself, plans that made a
stronger U.N. impossible by vitiating the strongest features of the Great Powers’
original ideas for an organization that would be able to maintain permanent
peace. These final plans were drawn up, ironically enough, by the Great Powers
themselves during the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of August and September
x Preface
1944. It was there that the representatives of the United States, Great Britain,
and the Soviet Union decided that their own, individual interests were too
important to entrust to a world body, that the wartime dream of an interna­
tional peacekeeping agency might interfere with their own nationalistic dreams
of hegemony, and that their differences, highlighted by current events in
Eastern Europe, might make their full cooperation impossible and, perhaps,
undesirable. It was there that, for those hoping for a strong United Nations
Oiganization, the shadow fell between the word and the deed.
That all of this is not more widely known is due primarily to the fact that so
litde has been published about the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. No book
exists on the meeting itself, and the best of the more general works on the
postwar settlement, Thomas Campbell’s Masquerade Peace and Robert Divined
Second Chance, treat the conference ably but in little more than summary form.
Thus, one reason for widespread misconceptions about what the United Na­
tions has done is a lack of detailed understanding about what it was really
intended to do. A study of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference reveals that the
U.N.’s shortcomings did not develop out of a failure of application; they were
an intentional part of the plans for the world body as negotiated by the Great
Powers in the summer of 1944.
This book is an attempt to explain how this happened—how the wartime
dream of world peace led to plans for a postwar organization lacking the
authority to achieve it. It is the story of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference.
Naturally, I have not undertaken such a project without the assistance of many
others, and 1 am happy for this opportunity to express my gratitude for their
generous aid and support. The Office of Research at The University of South
Dakota supported my efforts over two summers, one devoted to research and
another to writing. Its generosity helped make this study possible. Without
research librarians we would all be lost—in the stacks, if not earlier. I have
debts to many of them at several facilities: the National Archives, the Library of
Congress, the Public Record Office in London, the Franklin D. Roosevelt
library, Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, and Mudd Library at
Princeton University. My manuscript has also benefited from the support and
advice of my editors and readers at the University of North Carolina Press. This
book is dedicated to Jan Hilderbrand, who brought peace and order to my
world.