United Nations Founded
In the spring of 1945, delegates from 50 nations gathered in San Francisco to draft and sign the Charter of the United Nations, creating an international organization meant to prevent another world war. The charter was signed on 26 June and took effect on 24 October, after the required number of states, including the major powers, had ratified it. The UN became the central institution of the postwar international system, and it remains the largest forum in which nearly every country on Earth takes part.
The idea had roots in earlier efforts. The League of Nations, founded after the First World War, had failed to stop aggression by Japan, Italy and Germany in the 1930s, and the United States never joined it. During the Second World War, the Allied powers began planning a stronger successor. The term "United Nations" was first used in the Declaration by United Nations of January 1942, in which the Allies pledged to fight the Axis together. Further planning took place at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in 1944, where the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China drafted a basic framework, and at the Yalta conference in early 1945, where the leaders settled the thorny question of voting in the Security Council.
The San Francisco Conference opened in late April 1945 and ran for about two months. Smaller and mid-sized states pushed for a larger role for the General Assembly and for provisions on human rights and economic and social cooperation. The final charter set up several main bodies: a General Assembly in which every member has one vote, a Security Council with the power to authorize action, a Secretariat, an International Court of Justice and an Economic and Social Council. The Security Council gave five permanent members, the US, the USSR, Britain, France and China, a veto, a compromise the great powers insisted on as the price of their participation. Poland, absent from the conference because of a dispute over its government, was added later as an original member.
The UN's record has been mixed. Cold War rivalries often paralyzed the Security Council, and the veto has repeatedly blocked action on major crises. Yet the organization has also overseen decolonization, deployed peacekeeping missions, and produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Agencies such as the World Health Organization, UNESCO and UNICEF grew out of its system and have shaped global health, education and child welfare.
Membership has grown from 50 founding states to nearly 200. Debates over Security Council reform, the limits of state sovereignty and the UN's effectiveness continue, but the institution endures as the main embodiment of the attempt to manage world affairs through law and cooperation rather than force alone.