Year Zero (42 page)

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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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).
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