Twice in the 20th century, men have sought to create a new world order. The League of Nations, conceived with high hopes as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, failed catastrophically. At the outbreak of the second world war, it was to be found solemnly engaged in the task of standardising European railway gauges. The United Nations, by contrast, was born in a mood of profound disillusionment in 1945. It was not, so it seemed, only the League that had failed, but also the conception of man that had been embodied in it, a conception that had been torn apart so savagely by the Nazis.
Unlike the League, the United Nations has survived, but its position has all too often been that of the man who passed by on the other side. Its failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda, so Mark Mazower argues, ‘prompted critics to fume’ at its impotence. In Kosovo, Britain and the United States were only able to prevent ethnic cleansing through bypassing it. In Iraq, neither the interventionists, led by Bush, nor their opponents, displayed much confidence in the institution, Bush, because it would not act against Saddam Hussein, his opponents because it was unable to prevent the use of force.
Mazower’s aim is to show, by analysing the ideological origins of the United Nations, that the organisation’s deficiencies are rooted in its history. Despite the high-sounding rhetoric of the Charter, the UN was never intended to be an instrument for humanitarian intervention or the protection of minorities. The three great powers — the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union — that gave birth to it would not have accepted a body which could poke its nose into their internal affairs.
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