Professor Patricia Clavin (BA, PhD)

This book offers a new view of the twentieth century, placing international ideas and institutions at its heart.

© Cambridge University Press 2015. In September 1939, the nationalism which characterized politics in the 1930 s gave way to the internationalism of war. In the realm of international relations, this translated into a renewed enthusiasm for internationalist ideas, and for projects of international organization that were born also of the desire to cement wartime alliances, and to effect reconstruction and international security once the war was won. The project of international organization was primarily, but not exclusively, the concern of the Grand Alliance: Britain, the USA and the USSR. Among the Axis powers, only Germany showed any interest in building institutions that would promote fascism internationally. By the time the Grand Alliance was victorious, the new superstructure for global governance set up during the war was represented by a range of new institutions that radiated from the new United Nations Organization (UNO) based in New York. Appending the ‘O’ - for Organization - onto the United Nations was significant. The term ‘United Nations’ was used first by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to describe the Allies in December 1941, and the UNO’s first step toward institutionalization came at the Arcadia Conference in January 1942, with the Declaration by the United Nations signed by twenty-six governments: the USA, the UK, the USSR and China (the ‘Big Four’), nine US allies in Central America and the Caribbean, the White Dominions and India, and eight European governments-in-exile. The USA aside, all the signatories were, or recently had been, members of the League of Nations, and the Declaration was steeped in the language of Wilsonianism. The drive to forge new organizations was redolent with history. At the same time, for many, institutionalizing the United Nations into an organization was intended to signal a shift away from the habits of great-power politics and the personal diplomacy of national leaders who dominated the international stage.