After the end of the Second World War in 1945, politicians around the world were determined to put an end to the system of state constructed by the mono-nation-state, and to imagine the ultimate war and ethnic hatred in a universalist way. Thus, as a product of global peace and human development, the United Nations was born. Despite the many criticisms today that the role of the United Nations in today's international arena is becoming increasingly weak, it still has an irreplaceable role in the context of international cooperation for peace and development. And this understanding of this institutional design and philosophy must be traced back to the origins of the United Nations— how the great power statesmen and idealistic intellectuals of 1945 walked through the legacy of history to reach this difficult but imperative consensus on human ideals.
Political mythology and political scientists aside, historian Mark Mezzol, in His book No Magic Palace, reconstructs the conceptual struggles and ideological origins behind the founding of the United Nations. The United Nations is the product of debate and compromise, as well as the reflection and repentance of humanity on the ruins of two world wars. Whether it is South African Prime Minister Shi Mozi, historian Zimmern, or international law lawyer Lemkin, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, perhaps their ideas are very different, or even-for-tat. But at some point, they all sincerely believed that the world created by the United Nations would be the future of humanity. But it is precisely this "ambiguous" attitude of the United Nations that allows it to adapt its role at any time, so that mankind will no longer repeat the mistakes of 20th century history.
The United Nations is not a utopia of permanent peace, nor is it a marionette in the shadow of great power politics. It not only continued the ideal of the universal order under the imperial rule of the old era, but also inspired the new countries to pursue national independence. It is a testing ground for the game and struggle between the ideas of two civilizations, and it is also an attempt by human beings to expect to get out of the jungle world.
The world we live in today is still in the shadow of this battle of ideas.
"No Magic Palace" by Mark Mazor Translator: Zhu Shilong Version: Guangxi Normal University Press May 2022
Mark Mazower is a British historian and professor of history at Columbia University in the United States, who has won the Wolfson Prize in History and the Duff Cooper Prize, and domestic readers are more familiar with his book "Five Hundred Years in the Balkans". In Mazor's recent book, No Palace of Magic, he makes revealing the ideological origins of the United Nations a primary concern.
Historians of international relations generally agree that the United Nations is an invention of the twentieth century, the embodiment of a new international order. This international order requires the use of legal norms to govern the world and the replacement of traditional balance of power politics with a system of collective security. It questions the legitimacy of war as a foreign policy instrument, controls international competition, and reduces the space for free state action. This is undoubtedly a revolutionary change in comparison with the tight imperialist rivalry of the late nineteenth century and the unbridled struggle for hegemony among the great powers.
In the first half of the book, Mazor questions this view, arguing that the United Nations was not the original creation of American idealists, and that British "imperial internationalists" contributed to its emergence. He believed that the Purpose of creating the League of Nations and the United Nations was to preserve the Empire, not to destroy it. In support of this view, Mazor highlighted the views and actions of two men: one was Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts of South Africa, who wrote the preface to the UN Charter; The other was the British historian Alfred Zimmern, the most prominent internationalist theorist of his time and an ardent supporter of the League of Nations.
Colonialist world order?
Let's start with The Enders, who argues that "if modern colonial empires were the result of a generation in the late 19th century, then Enders was the leader of the subsequent generation who tried to extend the lifespan of white-ruled empires through international cooperation." To put it bluntly, there is a straight line... The route takes us from the constitutional restructuring of the last decades of the British Empire to the establishment of the United Nations. ”
Here we need to introduce you with a little background knowledge, to tell you about the last man of history, and his journey to become a British imperialist. In 1795, the British entered South Africa and gradually became at odds with the local Boers (inhabitants of Dutch descent). During the Boer War of 1899-1902, the British deployed an army equivalent to almost half the boer population, costing £220 million to win the war using scorched earth tactics (the British locked 110,000 Boers in concentration camps and 28,000 people died inside). During this war, Semedt was a commander of the Boer guerrillas. Logically, the Boers and the Last Capital should be the enemies of the British. But this is not the case. This is because after the Boer War, the British quickly reformed and established a set of democratic elections and accountable government in South Africa. The British did not exclude the surrendered Boers from this political process, and the Boers, by virtue of their numerical superiority, won the election and gradually gained political dominance in South Africa. When the South African Union was formed in 1909, the Boer statesman Louis Botta was elected as the first Prime Minister. In other words, although the British won the war, they treated the Boers equally after the victory and handed over the entire South African regime. This kind of imperial arrogance inevitably turns into a jade warrior. "Four years later, they gave us everything about our country, except for the name," Smoze said. Has this miracle of trust and magnanimity ever happened before? He has since become a staunch British Imperialist.
Former South African Prime Minister Jan Smudge.
Smuts held a number of cabinet positions in the Botta government. During World War I, he led The South African Army to fight in Africa. The Imperial Government looked at him differently and promoted him to the War Cabinet of the British Empire, which is a high power. He was one of Britain's key delegates at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Between the two world wars, he returned to South Africa as Prime Minister and was also a prominent figure in imperial affairs. In World War II, he was appointed Field Marshal of the British Army. He was a close friend of Churchill (Churchill had the metaphor of "two old lovers of birds moulting together on a perch"), and it was believed at the time that if Churchill died or was incapacitated in the war, he would succeed him as Prime Minister of England (there was indeed a plan in the government, and King George V approved of it).
Privately, the British Empire was not short of money for the end of history. "People treat me as a soldier of the country, and I repay it with a soldier of the country" is not a reason that only China has. To a large extent, the survival of white Afrikaner society also depended to a large extent on the goodwill of the British Empire. It just so happened that the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth century also had a racist layered governance flavor. In the late nineteenth century, the entire British Empire was effectively divided into two circles. The Inner Circle was a colony of white colonies established by the British and British immigrants. The outer circle is a non-white territory other than that. The British were very friendly to the predominantly white colonies and saw them as partners. In the words of the people of the time, "[the British Empire should have] a closer organic connection between a series of autonomous peoples who flowed the same blood under a monarchy." ...... Judging from their relationship with each other, they are a democratic people. "The English at the end of the nineteenth century were clearly heavy on the inside over the outside. In their view, the white settled colonies were an extension of the British state, while India and other colonies were only the property of the empire. For Smalts, the taste of this racist stratified governance of the British Empire was quite appetizing. For in the same period in South Africa, it was the period when the racist segregation system was established. A small number of whites lived in the ocean of the vast blacks, constantly worried, and needed to draw strength from imperial protection to maintain this apartheid system.
In this way, The Last Vester saw the British Empire as an ideal international order. In this international order, Britain existed as the head of the empire, leading the empire with its "moral spirit" and influence, but did not interfere in or regulate the internal affairs of the dominions, but provided them with economic and political support. Empires existed in a sort of loose political connection, combined with affection, shared values, and economic interests. The Scotts praised the British Empire's model as "the only successful international government experiment". He added: "The ancient British Empire has once again proved its miraculous power, linking the complete freedom and independence of each country with a worldwide group of free countries, satisfying both national sentiments and the trend of international cooperation, which are the most powerful forces of our time." ”
So what poses the greatest threat to this ideal? It is a competition between empires. According to Schwartz, the First World War showed that old-style alliance politics within Europe could easily undermine Europe's mission of civilization on the outside. Some new international arrangement must therefore be reached in the post-war period to resolve the issue. Therefore, in order to solve this threat, Schwarzkopf strongly supported the extension of the British Empire model to the entire international sphere, achieving great power coordination and stabilizing the colonial order. During the Paris Peace Conference, he vigorously promoted the establishment of the League of Nations, and after the end of World War II, he actively wrote the preamble to the CHARTER of the United Nations.
The world through the eyes of conservatives
If the case of the last vestiges of history primarily reflects the desire for a stable, white-dominated international order, another of the book's focal points, the British historian Alfred Zimmern, shows what form a British imperialist should think about the League of Nations.
Interestingly, Zimmern also has some ties to South Africa. Zimmern is a member of the Knights of the Round Table. The group was organized by The South African High Commissioner, Lord Milner, who at the time "was always seeking to address what they considered to be the most pressing international problem of our time, namely, how to reconcile the growing nationalist sentiments of the white colonies of the British Empire with the continued rule of London." So he gathered a group of young intellectuals from elite universities and asked them to think about the relationship between dominions and Britain, about how the British Empire should be organized.
Zimmern's reflections were that "the greatest strength of the Commonwealth/British Empire is its flexibility." It was precisely because of its lack of a clear centralized government or a clear constitutional system that it evolved and adapted to the political aspirations of the other: the british empire grew strong from the emergence of a common consciousness, not from a political mechanism. Like all enduring polities, it is essentially a social organism united by a common moral purpose and culture. In other words, Zimmern argues that the organization of the British Empire should preferably be informal, not with a unified totalitarian government or a well-defined political mechanism to coordinate relations between the central and colonial regions, but by some sort of "Great Britain society" to play a role of unity.
Sir Alfred Eckhard Zimmern was born in Surrey, England in 1879, where he was taught at Winchester College and later studied classics at New College, Oxford. In 1903 he lectured on ancient history at New College, Oxford, where he worked as a fellow and mentor from 1904 to 1909, and from 1930 to 1944 as Professor of International Relations at oxford University, becoming the world's first professor in the field of international relations studies. His major works include The Third British Empire (1926), The Prospect of Democracy (1929), Neutrality and Collective Security (1936), and League of Nations and Jurisprudence (1936).
Readers who are relatively new to the history of the British Empire may be a little confused about Zimmern's intentions. Here's why the British Empire has always been loosely organized. There is no unified system of command between Britain and its Dominions and colonies, and there are no constitutional documents to regulate it. The question of what exactly the relationship between Britain and Canada, Australia, and other places, where the central organs of the empire are, has always been unresolved.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the world was entering an era of greater competition, when many Britons felt the need to integrate their British Empire. In 1883, for example, J.R. Seeley, a professor of history at the University of Cambridge, in his famous book The Expansion of England, pointed out that "what is effortless to do in the United States, it (England) can also do, that is, to unite the regions that are far apart from each other within a federal organization." The Imperial Federation movement arose at the time, a trend of thought and politics that arose in England and the Dominions after the 1870s to unify the Empire and provide a formal political framework for the Empire (whether it was the establishment of an Imperial Federal Government or the Establishment of an Imperial General Assembly).
But this idea and movement was opposed by many British, including Zimmern. They believe that the political order must have grown naturally. Forcing a large political community is counterproductive. This is actually the traditional view of British conservatives, who distinguish between "artificial unity" and "natural unity", arguing that forcing a formal empire will only lead to "chaos, misfortune and weakness". The existing situation is already very good, "language, culture, communication, history, common habits, systems and ways of thinking" is enough to ensure the unity of the empire, and political unity is only a form, appearance and consequence, and is not enough evidence.
Rather than being conservative, these conservatives see the political difficulties that organizing an international organization/empire in a nationalist world is bound to face. This ambiguity of the British Empire largely avoided disputes between sovereign governments.
When Zimmern considered the question of the League of Nations after World War I, he naturally brought in the experience of the British Empire, and he thought that it was unrealistic to establish a world government or a highly regulated international organization. Zimmern suggested that the peace talks delegates consider something more permanent than an irregular meeting, but much less than the creation of a world nation. The League of Nations will be formally established and will continue to exist, but in essence it will be a forum of great powers. "His criticism of the League of Nations' proposal to maintain world peace simply by promoting a unified and standardized system of international law 'is not only naïve, but ... Ridiculous'". Zimmern endorses the concept of the "international community," arguing that "it is not connected by formal norms, much less by international organizations and their cumbersome and selfish bureaucracies, but by a shared sense of moral community." And this international/moral community has its leaders, before World War I was Britain and after World War I was the United States.
In short, the league of nations and the United Nations that Zimmern advocated were more of an international forum than a formal international organization binding on the great powers. We will find that the future League of Nations and the United Nations did reflect these characteristics advocated by Zimmern. This is of course the result of many synergies, but theorists such as Zimmern do provide ideological resources.
The "informality" of the United Nations
In my opinion, the book "No Magic Palace" is typical of "flowers and flowers with hearts, and willows without hearts". Mazor's important conclusion was that "the United Nations is a product of empire," but neither the politician Kemald nor the theoretician Zimmern saw any signs of swaying the ideology of the United Nations. Britain's national strength weakened after World War II, and it was even less likely to play a leading role. Therefore, this conclusion is inevitably exaggerated. However, if one takes another angle and changes the question of whether the United Nations was founded under imperialist leadership to "how did the British liberal imperialists understand the League of Nations and the United Nations" or "what is the inheritance relationship between the imperial order of the nineteenth century and the new international order of the twentieth century", then the description of this book is indeed novel and eye-catching.
From April 25 to June 26, 1945, representatives of 50 countries gathered in San Francisco, California, united States, to hold a united nations conference of international organizations.
This book does have an important insight — in the past we generally thought of the United Nations as a revolutionary creation, an idealist repudiation of the imperial order, an empire as a realist system of state hegemony, and an incompatibility between the empire and the United Nations. The book points out that this is not the case. The British imperialists of the late nineteenth century did already have a template for a non-hegemonic international order, so they were later more receptive to new things like the League of Nations and the United Nations—whether it was seen, as in The Endeze, as a tool to suppress competition among European countries and to secure the primacy of white civilization, or as an informal mechanism of state cooperation, as Seen by Zimmern ,in which the great powers, led by their normative influence, were not too constrained by the sovereignty of nations).
In this book, Mazor is mainly critical of the "imperial" element of the United Nations, arguing that the United Nations was initially swayed by the imperialists. I think that these imperial elements are not necessarily all bad, that the British imperialists at the end of the nineteenth century, because of their own difficulties, have had a certain thinking about international cooperation, and it is these imperial elements that have played a certain positive role, helping to build bridges between the old and the new order. Imagine if the League of Nations and the United Nations had indeed established a strict control mechanism for international affairs and a central body with centralized power, then the fierce contradictions and conflicts between sovereign states and them could be predicted. The nature of the United Nations forum may be "just right", the powder is too white, and the Shiju is too red. In this sense, this "ambiguous state" of the United Nations comes from historical wisdom. It is difficult to envisage an international order without the United Nations, and only the "ambiguity" of the United Nations, which has enabled humanity to achieve lasting peace and prosperity today.
Boer War: The First Rift in Colonial Rule
There is another thing worth investigating in the book, and that is the dispute between Shi Mozi and Nehru in the United Nations. The main purpose of this book is to illustrate through this controversy how the United Nations has changed from a "white tool" to a forum for modern nation-states. But I think the content of this chapter is more illustrative of the inner plight of the British Empire.
Some modern empires (such as England and France) are very different from the ancient empires: these empires have realized universal citizenship and inclusive social rights in their homeland, and their ruling elites have been selected on this basis. Whether (or whether) these domestic political principles can be applied to the overseas territories they have conquered, then, poses a fundamental conundrum. If the political system and laws of the mother country are applied to the territory, either the place cannot exercise arbitrary rule (thus to a considerable extent, the value of the place to the empire itself) is lost, or the people of the place can participate in the local politics of the empire (thus posing a competition and threat to the local society of the empire at the social level). But if it is not applied, the ideologies of the home country are in danger of bankruptcy (which often emerge as universal in the first place). It has been found that the resulting contradictions are almost intractable. One way to resort to racism is to argue that some races are suitable for democracy or the rule of law and that some races are culturally unsuitable. In this way, empires could be united through some sort of "multicultural" system. But the problem with racism was that it also discouraged those collaborators among the subjects, leading to large gaps in the governance structure of the empire.
Nehru at the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.
This was the case with British rule over India. As mentioned above, the British Empire actually had a considerable degree of racist hierarchical governance, which was good for the white dominions, but discriminated against other colonies that were not white. For the British, there is a hesitation about whether indians are British or not or whether they will be able to become British in the future. After the Great Indian Uprising, the British tended to answer: "No". This was reflected both in the british's reluctance to establish a representative responsible government in India and in the fact that the British did not grant British or imperial citizenship to Indians.
In South Africa, the Boers were very insecure in the face of an overwhelming majority of blacks, and for that reason they had been pushing for a system of apartheid. At that time, South Africa already had a group of Indian immigrants, which was the product of the flow of people in the empire. The Boers were very keen to put them under control as well, and their attitude was that "Indians should not be given equal rights, lest in the coming centuries a huge reservoir of Indian races ... was opened, which led to the submergence of the entire Imperial Dominion". This includes both revoking the right to vote for Indians in South Africa and prohibiting them from intermarrying with whites, or buying land, moving, and so on.
Boer anti-India sentiment is high because before the 1940s, the Boers did not have the highest economic and social status in South Africa. In 1910, the Boers made up only 29 percent of the city's population, and by 1936 they had surpassed 50 percent. These new urban migrants are generally poor, poorly educated, inferior and insecure compared to the English-speaking population. Three-quarters of them are working class. Indian immigrants were clearly more knowledgeable and skilled than black South Africans, and their ecological niche was closest to that of the Boers, so the Boers were also the most repulsive to them.
Boer guerrillas in the Boer War.
Faced with the South African government's discriminatory policy against Indians, the new Indian government protested. "Indian politicians want London to make a difference. But the British government has no intention of intervening because it cannot resolve the current impasse and sees it as a problem that belongs between India and South Africa. Mazor points directly to the root cause of Britain's non-intervention attitude – "If the Commonwealth is to remain cohesive, it means that some kind of arbitration procedure must be set up to settle disputes between members, but in practice such a formal mechanism does not exist, mainly because India's position within the Commonwealth has not yet been determined." In other words, the British, because of their own racist attitudes, and the "informal nature" of the Empire itself, actually hindered the unity and unity of the Empire.
From the perspective of the new Indian government, if the problem cannot be resolved within the British Empire/Commonwealth, then the new international platform, the United Nations, can only be used to raise the voice of protest. This is where the dispute between Semdez and Nehru in the United Nations came from, and it was a testament to the failure of the British Empire.
Author/Zheng Fei
Editor/Yuan Chunxi
Proofreading/Liu Baoqing