The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations

Book by Kennedy Paul

Kennedy: THE PALIAMENT OF MAN

PART 1

The Origins
CHAPTER 1

The Troubled Advance to a New World Order, 1815–1945

The idea of a universal association of humankind goes back hundreds if not thousands of years. Some works claim that ancient Chinese philosophers or Greek sages were arguing even then for the establishment of a world order. Others suggest that Catholic theologians in the Middle Ages proposed some form of universal governance, no doubt Christian in construction but reaching out to all peoples. All sorts of institutional and scholarly names are tossed out here: the federation of Greek city-states, the Stoics, various disciples of Confucius, Dante, William Penn, the Abbé de St.-Pierre with his “Project to Render Peace Perpetual in Europe” (1713), the American founding fathers in their pursuit of a “more perfect union,” and then, perhaps especially, the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace of 1795. The list is long; later, even Lenin wrote in favor of “the United States of Europe,” while H. G. Wells and Arnold Toynbee pleaded for a new international system of affairs.1

It comes as no surprise that most of these texts were composed near the end of, or shortly after, a great and bloody war. They were efforts to find a way out of the international anarchy, to escape the repeated struggles between cities, monarchies, and states, and to establish long-lasting peace. All of them sought to constrain selfish, sover- eign power, usually by some form of league of nations that would take action against a country that broke the existing order. The mechanisms were therefore reactive, assuming humankind’s propensity to conflict but trusting that such dangerous drives could be headed off. They were devices to chain national egoism; as St.-Pierre argued, all members must be placed in a “mutual state of dependence.” From this negative intent there would flow positive benefits: global harmony, rising prosperity, the pursuit of the arts, and so on.

To say that this was idealist would be a gross understatement.We might note that Kant’s great treatise was composed just a few years before Napoleon began his rampage across Europe, leaving damaged and raped communities everywhere. Nonetheless, these early writings contained ideas that would not go away. They were ideas, moreover, that formed a central part of the intellectual architecture of the Enlightenment, the rise of the free trade movement, and the advance of Western liberalism. There was, to be sure, no real move toward a universal monarchy in the early nineteenth century, nor toward any parliament of man. Indeed, the only international structure at that time was the rather informal Concert of Europe, run by the five Great Powers, which was usually conservative in hue. However, since each of those powers was reluctant to risk another expensive and potentially destabilizing war, a general peace obtained.2

Despite that conservatism, there also existed an urge toward the more liberal conduct of affairs, especially in Western Europe and the United States. Advocates of perpetual peace may not have had their hopes fulfilled (there were many smaller wars outside of Europe in the decades following 1815, and revolutionary movements within the Continent were usually crushed), but reformers applauded the news of the increasing legislation against slavery and the slave trade, the emancipation of Catholics in Britain and of Jews in France and the Habsburg Empire, and the reduction or elimination of protectionist tariffs such as the Corn Laws—not because any single change was of itself transforming, but because collectively they comprised movement in the direction of greater peace, tolerance, and interdependence. Tennyson, in the flush of composing “Locksley Hall,” was not alone in his optimism about humankind’s capacity for progress. He was preceded, joined, and followed by some of the greatest names in the Western liberal tradition—Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, Comte, and Mill—as well as by his great contemporary and former classmate, the later prime minister William Gladstone, who with like-minded politicians sought to turn these notions into practice.

In such progressive yet pragmatic fashion, the nineteenth century thus witnessed a series of measures, both legal and commercial, that, it was hoped, would move the world away from international anarchy. The coming of free trade to Britain, later championed across Europe by its ardent disciple Richard Cobden, was hailed not just as an act of economic liberalization, but as a bonding together of peoples, their mutual dependency preventing future war. The creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (1864) was recognition of the need to treat prisoners of war fairly and a signal advance in “the laws of war”; it was, arguably, the first treaty-bound international organization. By century’s end, the two Hague peace conferences (1899 and 1907) would codify the treatment of civilians and neutrals in wartime and provide a mechanism for the peaceful settlement of disputes.3 Meanwhile, the technical innovations that fascinated Tennyson and his fellow Victorians continued apace. The laying of the first submarine cable between Britain and the United States was hailed by both governments as a bond of harmony; the Universal Postal Union provided a similar bond; and the free flow of capital across the globe was praised as if it were the lubricant to ease the world’s troubles and bring prosperity to all. In John Maynard Keynes’s gorgeous description, a gentleman before 1914 “could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country without passport or other formality, could dispatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself much aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement.”4

Yet, as the great economist would readily have conceded, there were other, more daunting elements within the international system. The first was that it remained in essence a European-centered pentarchy, right up until the 1890s; and when Japan and the United States joined the club at the end of the nineteenth century, it simply shifted a little to become a septarchy. The Great Powers still did bilateral or multilateral deals. The Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), for example, whereby Teddy Roosevelt brokered an end to the Russo- Japanese War, seemed more an affirmation of the old order than a harbinger of any new way of dealing with such matters, despite the award to him, as a result, of the Nobel Peace Prize. Second, advancing cosmopolitan tendencies did not stop the larger nations from their most massive bout of colonization, in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific; 1870–1914 was the age when the “North” really did take over the “South.” International civil society was thus confined to the Western nations, the British dominions, Japan, and the independent states of Latin America; it would remain so until the late 1940s. Subjugated to imperial rule, other peoples remained excluded.

Nor did growing international integration prevent the biggest armaments buildup in history up to that time. The Prussian army’s decisive defeats of the Habsburg Empire in 1866 and of France in 1870 spurred an anxious reform of all armies, both qualitatively and quantitatively—conscription of millions of men in peacetime became the norm, except within the Anglo-American nations. Defense spending soared to dizzying heights. Following Otto von Bismarck’s initial and secret contract with Vienna in 1879, the Great Powers began to assemble into combinations, each of which was pledged to war if an ally was threatened. In parallel with the military buildups, there was the proliferation of naval “races”—the Royal Navy against the French and Russian navies, the rise of the American and Japanese fleets, the Anglo-German antagonism across the North Sea. Truly, the era from 1871 to 1914 was a bizarre and puzzling one, with great and increasing evidence of international integration existing side by side with ethnic-nationalist passions, warmongering, and social Darwinist notions about the primacy of struggle. In many regards it is not unlike today’s world, where theories about the rise of new Asian superpowers and growing awareness of the possibility of a terrorist cataclysm jostle with evidence of the ever greater globalization and interdependence of all peoples.

This contest between “merchants and warriors” was won by the latter, decisively, in August 1914.5 Sparked by an assassination and a long-standing conflict in the Balkans, which then escalated through the alliance system across most of Europe, the Great Powers marched to war, as traditionally they had done, in defense of perceived national interests. Bankers like the Rothschilds were dismayed beyond measure; generals everywhere were confirmed in their beliefs. There was no parliament of man, only the god of Mars.

But this war was different from that of 1870 or even the hegemonic struggle of 1793–1815. World War I fatefully combined international anarchy on the one hand and modern mass industrialized warfare on the other. The losses of human life, along the western front, the Isonzo, and the eastern front, in the Balkans, the Atlantic, and Mesopotamia, were beyond all measure and compreh...