No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, Mark Mazower (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 232 pp., $25 cloth.

This book calls into question central aspects of the history of the founding of the United Nations, providing a fresh platform for contemporary assessments of the future of the world organization. The Columbia University historian Mark Mazower challenges the premise that the United Nations marked a clean break from its discredited forerunner, the League of Nations. The new organization took its cues not, for instance, from the mid-century proposals for regional councils, for world government, or for an alliance of democracies, but precisely from the model provided by its post–World War I predecessor, an association of states anchored by the great powers. As at Paris in 1919, this model was successful not centrally for its potential to realize the worldwide enactment of self-determination, but because it gave shape to an imperial brand of internationalism, affording yet another means for the globalization of European values.

The United Nations differed from the League mainly in being even more a creature of the leading states, with the major modification being the addition of veto power for the five permanent Security Council members—an addition intended to keep the wartime alliance together. The United Nations would also follow different trajectories than the League on questions of minority rights, nationality, and the importance of international law; and all of these evolutionary changes in international society receive prominent attention throughout Mazower's book. But his argument—which is developed through accounts of the contributions of prominent statesmen and particular theorists and social scientists—all unfolds from the insight that the intellectual history of the United Nations has to be given not as a mid-century, postwar American narrative, but instead in the context of intellectual currents (not to mention particular idea entrepreneurs) that had been in play at least since the turn of the twentieth century.

The punch line is that perhaps we should be less disappointed in the United Nations as it is today, for, unlike the League, it has managed both to survive and to weave itself into the fabric of international life. Perhaps most important, the United Nations has been able to redefine itself, and to help redefine international society quite profoundly. Indeed, the General Assembly eventually evolved into an anticolonial forum led by Third World nationalists, who, taking the universalist rhetoric of the organization at face value, promoted a conception of global order premised on the breakup of empire rather than on its preservation.