The United Nations (UN) went through several historical phases before it formally came into existence in 1945 on the ruins of a previous international organization, with the First and Second World Wars playing the most crucial roles in determining its identity, objectives, and orientations.
The emergence of the UN, as the most prominent international body since the middle of the 20th century, coincided with accelerating regional and international developments. Those developments posed challenges and threats to international peace and security, prompting the creation of an arbitration mechanism concerned about adjudicating disputable issues, and ensuring stability worldwide.
At the outset of the 20th century, several initiatives were devised to fulfil the critical need for an international body aimed at settling disagreements and disputes and stopping mounting fighting. However, all those initiatives went up in smoke due to the then warring parties’ conflicting interests and the growing colonialism as a Western attempt to finance the industrial revolution and pay the extravagant bill of its renaissance.
The first initiative seeking to establish an effective international body with the aim of bringing all parties to the negotiating table was devised in 1918 following the assassination of Archduke Frantz Ferdinand of Austria, the heir presumptive to the throne of Austria and Hungary, along with his wife during a visit to Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This assassination triggered a series of incidents that culminated in the outbreak of World War I.
With the nations being extensively militarized and youths and men increasingly caught up in the raging wars, influential voices in Britain and the United States called for the creation of a permanent international organization that preserves international peace, security and cooperation. An enthusiastic proponent of this approach was the 28th US president Woodrow Wilson, who, in 1918, formulated his 14-Points statement regarding the aspired international body to end the war. A few months later, the warring parties announced ceasefire before the allies convened at The Paris Peace Conference to establish the terms of peace and agree on the establishment of the League of Nations.
A year later, Wilson submitted the Treaty of Versailles and the Charter of the League of Nations to the US Senate floor for ratification. Although the senate rejected the treaty, the establishment of the League of Nations was formally declared in Jan. 10, 1920 with the UK, France, Italy and Japan as the permanent members. Then the charter, which was ratified by 42 countries, was put in force.
Despite never being a League of Nations member, the US kept backing the newly founded international body’s economic and social duties via the activities of private charities as well as dispatching US representatives to its committees. However, over the subsequent years, the League of Nations was found incompetent to achieve its aspired objectives, and this failure was highly manifested during the 1930s economic crisis. The relative successes achieved by the League of Nations in the 1920s were insufficient for the international body to gain the confidence of its members and other states worldwide. This was demonstrated in the League’s failure to take measures to stop the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in Feb. 1933, or to prevent the eruption of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.
Since the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the League’ Geneva-based main headquarters along with all other bureaus were shut down. This vacuum in international arbitration continued until the Inter-Allied Conference that resulted in the Declaration of St James’s Palace (aka the London Declaration) on June 12, 1941 as the initial step towards the establishment of the United Nations.
In Aug. 1941, US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill drafted the so-called “Atlantic Charter” to determine the goals of the post-war world. Eight governments-in-exile of the countries under occupation of the Axis Powers along with the Soviet Union and representatives of the Free French Forces, announced they were unanimously committed to the common principles of policies proposed by Britain and the United States, during the subsequent meeting of the Allied Council in London on September 24, 1941.
On Jan.1, 1942, Roosevelt, Churchill, Diplomat Maxim Litvinov of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and Chinese politician Song Zedong signed the United Nations Declaration. On the following day, representatives of 22 other countries signed the declaration to make the ‘United Nations’ an official term for the Allies during World War II. Later on, the states seeking to join the newly-born international organization in its new form were required to sign the United Nations declaration first and then declare war on the Axis countries.
After three years, another 21 countries signed the United Nations Declaration, and after months of planning, the San Francisco Conference was held in 1945 with participation from delegates from 50 Allied countries and a number of non-governmental organizations. Representatives of 51 countries opposed to Germany and Japan signed the Charter on June 26, 1945 to be put into force formally on October 24, 1945, after it was approved by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council-- the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union and China-- as well as the majority of the other 46 signatories.
The first meetings of the UN General Assembly were held with participants from 51 countries, and the Security Council convened in London in January 1946.
The General Assembly chose New York City as the location for the United Nations headquarters, to establish the most important international organization ever on the ruins of the League of Nations that dissolved in 1946 after it failed to maintain international peace and security.
The United Nations has developed steadily since 1945, particularly after the large-scale decolonization trends since the 1960s, with 80 former colonies gaining their independence, including 11 trust territories. The UN’s five main organs contributed to consolidating its successes and its position in the international arena, after the sixth of these organs-- the Trusteeship Council-- suspended its functions on the Nov. 1, 1994, a month after the independence of Palau, which is the last remaining UN trusteeship territory.
The UN also includes 15 specialized agencies and depends on two types of funding sources; the mandatory contributions and voluntary contributions.
Beside addressing global challenges, the UN sought to enhance its responsibilities and democratic legitimacy by further involvement into the civil society activities worldwide. This principle was further consolidated by airing the first-ever public debate between candidates standing for the position of Secretary-General in 2016, that brought in Jan. 2017 former UN High Commissioner for Refugees Portuguese diplomat Antonio Guterres as the ninth UN Secretary General before being re-elected for a second five-year term on June 8, 2021.
