The history of the United Nations – its founding, fortunes, and fate – has been written so many times and from so many angles that a certain ennui might reasonably greet a new contribution to the cause. So convoluted a history is it that every author quite reasonably has his or her chosen personalities, events and political conundra via which to bring coherent meaning to a barely manageable whole. Mark Mazower’s No enchanted palace, drawing on a phrase uttered in caution at the 1945 founding conference in San Francisco by the UK ambassador, deserves attention beyond the ennui, however. It is a short, very well-written succession of chapters first delivered as the Stone Lectures at Princeton’s Davis Center, and it presents a quite novel, even quixotic, account. It skirts round any comprehensive recounting of wartime diplomacy and planning for the post-war world, instead offering ‘a series of probes into the ideological prehistory’ and post-war evolution of the United Nations. The subtitle captures two central foundations of Mazower’s argument – empire and ideological origins. For him, a true understanding of where the UN came from and where it has arrived involves not so much the US axis of power but begins with the British empire, especially in the colonial reaches of Africa and Asia.
After a broad introduction, the story picks up with a discussion of the South African statesman Jan Smuts. Smuts is mostly remembered today as an arch-racist of British colonialism, but he was among the throng who helped design the League of Nations after 1918 and, by Mazower’s account, a pivotal influence in refurbishing a nineteenth-century empire as a twentieth-century British ‘Commonwealth’. A luggage-bearer of ‘prewar liberal idealism’, Smuts re-emerges here as the author of the preamble to the UN Charter and therefore as a bridge between these two attempts at world organization. From there we move to Europe and the work of an obscure diplomatic advisor, Alfred Zimmern, who for Mazower is perhaps the ‘preeminent theorist of internationalism between the two world wars’ (p. 68). Like Smuts, he shared the civilizational and cultural aspirations of nationalism bound up with a paternalistic, Kantian internationalism, and was enamoured, too, with the notion of commonwealth while largely eschewing the accusation of imperialism; unlike Smuts, he saw the role of the US as central.
The next chapter picks up the theme of international law so central to the League and documents the eclipse of legal internationalism in the name of human rights doctrine encased in the UN. Mazower follows the establishment of the ‘Jewish state’ (itself a solution to a ‘European problem’) through debates and arguments among American Zionists, émigrés, and others, and the subsequent adoption of various rights protocols at the UN, including the Universal Declaration and the Genocide Convention. This shift notwithstanding, the mandatory rights of Palestinians written into law by the League and presumably strengthened with the UN were summarily discarded with the founding of Israel. The contradictions and weaknesses of the UN vision were thus evident from the start and Mazower concludes by tracing the rise of postcolonial power (however limited) in the early UN, spearheaded by the jewel of the faded British empire, India.
In Mazower’s reading, the United Nations embodied reasonable, if often contradictory, aspirations and, despite the recognition and sporadic influence of less powerful countries, it was more of a ‘great power directorate’ (p. 202) than the League that it succeeded. It was less an expression of US global ambition than an iterative solution to the problems of European imperialism, specifically the Commonwealth phase of the British imperium, itself a response to anti-colonial demands for greater independence. This decentred treatment of the UN has much merit but some flaws. Mazower sometimes seems to stretch to put players with otherwise limited sway at the centre of the UN’s ideological story. It is not at all clear, for example, that Smuts (who here becomes a symbolic, tragic-heroic figure of sorts) was so instrumental in keeping the Russians in the UN (p. 64). Likewise, the muted discussion toward the book’s end concerning the definitive contradiction of simultaneous nation-building and cosmopolitan internationalism could have been sharper if US imperial (albeit squarely anti-colonial) ambition, and the almost surreal 1944 bickering between Britain and the US over permanent membership in the Security Council, had been recounted up front. An even stronger case could have been made that anti-colonial movements and administrations simply exploited a contradiction necessitated in defence of great power privilege. (Although Israel intrudes here as something of an exception to the exception.)
By the same token, even a rudimentary concern with social class within and between nations – decentring the state-centred, geopolitics-friendly story of the UN – could have shed a brighter light on the uneasy coexistence between delegations of the more and the less powerful states, and the conundrum of the UN’s survival, a question with which Mazower concludes. More than the creative ‘ambiguity’ (read: pragmatic contradiction) of the founding documents or the UN’s existence on the edges rather than in the centre of global power, class compromise marks the fate of many successful national liberation movements in the post-war period and may have a central role in explaining the UN’s ability to survive its numerous failures.
Still, this is a very readable book, which complements accounts documenting the power of the Big Three and therein will have a useful teaching function. Mazower’s work is detached enough to flit from perspective to perspective on highly contentious issues, yet it is ingrained enough in the various debates to inhabit a number of different voices convincingly.
