{"product_id":"the-parliament-of-man-isbn-9780375703416","title":"The Parliament of Man","description":"\u003ci\u003eThe Parliament of Man \u003c\/i\u003eis the first definitive history of the United Nations, from one of America's greatest living historians.Distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy, author of the bestselling \u003ci\u003eThe Rise and Fall of Great Powers\u003c\/i\u003e, gives us a thorough and timely account that explains the UN's roots and functions while also casting an objective eye on its effectiveness and its prospects for success in meeting the challenges that lie ahead. Kennedy shows the UN for what it is: fallible, human-based, often dependent on the whims of powerful national governments or the foibles of individual administrators—yet also utterly indispensable. With his insightful grasp of six decades of global history, Kennedy convincingly argues that \"it is difficult to imagine how much more riven and ruinous our world of six billion people would be if there had been no UN.\"\"An artful study . . . that helps to set the record straight. . . . His assemblage of data is extraordinary.\" \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Kennedy traces this . . . story with concision, grace, and fairness. Nearly every page contains some delicious morsel . . . reflecting Kennedy’s intelligence and deep knowledge of world affairs.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Amid the morass of commissions and conferences, and failures like Rwanda, he manages to find something convincingly heroic.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003ePaul Kennedy is the author or editor of thirteen books, including \u003ci\u003ePreparing for the Twenty-first Century\u003c\/i\u003e and T\u003ci\u003ehe Rise and Fall of the Great Powers\u003c\/i\u003e, which has been translated into more than twenty languages. He serves on the editorial board of numerous scholarly journals and has written for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic Monthly\u003c\/i\u003e, and several other publications. Educated at Newcastle University and Oxford University, he is a former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University and of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in Bonn.Kennedy: THE PALIAMENT OF MAN\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    PART 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Origins\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      CHAPTER 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Troubled Advance to a New World Order,   1815–1945\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e       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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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 comprehension. When, for example, the British army  retired, bloodied and hurt, at the end of the first day of the Battle of  the Somme in July 1916, it had taken nearly sixty thousand casualties,  around twenty thousand fatal. (To give some perspective, U.S. forces’  losses in more than twenty-five years’ fighting in Vietnam were around  fifty-eight thousand.) This mutual leaching of the strength and manhood of  all the combatant nations had immense consequences, unintended by the  decision makers of 1914 who had disregarded the warnings of prewar  liberals that modern industrial conflict would shake the pillars of  Western life and society. The war shifted the balance of economic power  across the Atlantic and undermined Europe’s hegemony. It led to the  collapse of the Hohenzollern, Romanov, and Habsburg empires and to the  creation of myriad successor states. It transformed the Middle East. It  advanced Japan’s claims in the Pacific and Far East. It allowed the  Bolshevik Revolution and boosted the tendencies toward Fascism elsewhere  in Europe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The war also led, in almost equal measure, to unexpected and radical  domestic consequences. It furthered the cause of labor, since modern  warfare could not function without the recruitment of the masses. It  advanced the liberation of women, at least in the West, since they, too,  could not be recruited without trade-offs. It encouraged the growth of the  welfare state, since politicians on all sides promised their warring  proletariats “a home fit for heroes.” It increased the Exchequer’s  penetration into the economy, since this total war called for vastly  increased expenditures, and vastly increased taxes, upon virtually  everything that moved or stayed still. The First World War, in a nutshell,  created the modern age.6\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This catastrophe stimulated, as a reaction, the revival of the   Tennysonian idea that humankind simply had to bring their nations together  before they destroyed the world. Within a year or so of   the first battles, individuals in various countries—Lord Robert Cecil   in Britain, Léon Bourgeois in France, the South African general Jan Smuts,  President Woodrow Wilson, and his adviser Colonel Edward House—drafted  schemes for a postwar organization of states that would prevent any future  conflagration, through structures of con-  sultation and arbitration. The victory of the Allied Powers in No-  vember 1918 allowed those ideas to become the matter for serious political  negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference (it is doubtful if the victory  of Wilhelmine Germany would have led to talks leading   to world organization). The result was the Covenant of the League   of Nations, a treaty whose clauses laid out a set of rules and procedures  that League members pledged to observe in the pacific settlement of all  future disputes. Every sovereign nation, large or small (except for a  while the defeated Central Powers), could register for membership and  participate in the deliberations and decisions of this new body.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    While contemporaries marveled at the revolutionary and unprecedented  nature of the League, with Wilson in particular praising the arrrival of a  new international setup, it is important to notice the extent to which the  Covenant built upon the nineteenth-century Concert system rather than  replacing it. The committee that drafted the Covenant consisted of  representatives of the five victor powers (the British Empire, France, the  United States, Italy, and Japan), joined by some smaller states.  Essentially, though, this critical document was the work of Wilson and  House on the one hand and Cecil and Smuts on the other. All were for a  more open and inclusive international order, but none intended to rock the  boat. Inis Claude, the great historian of the United Nations, puts it  beautifully and wryly:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    [The founders of the League] accepted the independent sovereign state as a  basic entity, the great powers as the predominant participants, and Europe  as the central core of the world political system. They felt no sense of  failure or inadequacy when they created a League which did not represent a  fundamental alteration of the old system, since they regarded that system  as basically sound and workable. World War I was to them not an indication  that war is the typical and necessary result of the existence of sovereign  states, but a warning that accidents can happen. The task to which they  set themselves was that of creating safety devices to obviate the  repetition of such an unfortunate breakdown as had occurred in 1914.7\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Thus, there would be an Assembly of all the (noncolonized) nations of the  globe, but its meetings in neutral Geneva would be occasional, and real  weight would lie with the Council of the League of Nations, whose nine  members automatically included the five victor powers, the other four  seats being for rotating members, usually elected on a regional basis. The  world system had indeed advanced from the mere pentarchy of states that  ran the show after 1814; yet the League’s arrangements, like those that  emerged from the San Francisco conference in 1945, were a compromise  between the more egalitarian instincts of the smaller and medium-size  nations and the claims to privilege of the powerful few—with the latter  having the upper hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nevertheless, this was the closest the world community had come to  creating a parliament of man, and its proceedings generated much  excitement and hope throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. It was only  later that the view developed that the League experiment had been  worthless. In its early stages, though, the optimism seemed justified.  Here, for the first time in the history of humankind, there existed an  international organization, with headquarters in a settled neutral state,  which was committed to ways of solving problems through peaceful means and  thus avoiding the recourse to war. Much of the world was to be fascinated  at the regular and extraordinary meetings in Geneva, and many rejoiced at  the promise it offered. Small states especially—such as Belgium,  Czechoslovakia, Finland, and Colombia—felt that at last they had some  place at high table.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Progress toward international cooperation advanced on four parallel fronts  during the 1920s. The first was at what might be described as the merely  technical level—except that much of their work was not “merely” at all.  The International Labour Organization (ILO) had commenced its important  reviews of labor standards. There was an Opium Commission and an older  committee to prevent what was called “white slave traffic” (international  forced prostitution). There were agreements on civil aviation, which was  swiftly exploding in the 1920s. International postal and telegraph unions  flourished, as did maritime arrangements. Most of these were  intergovernmental organizations and thus not directly under the League’s  control. Still, they were a part of the evolving international  architecture and were increasingly associated with the League. Even the  Americans and Soviets, usually suspicious of entanglements abroad, began  to appreciate that international structures were not always a bad thing.  It is interesting to note that it was these technical bodies that were to  enjoy the greatest respect and that most of them would be absorbed into  the larger United Nations family by the late 1940s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was obvious to all why air traffic control, or opium control, was  uncontentious. They simply were needed for civilized life to go on. By  contrast, it was at the political level, and especially the territorial  level, that serious quarrels occurred. Even here, the League had  successes. It brokered a Finnish-Swedish dispute over the Aaland Islands  as early as 1920. It supervised, through a high commissioner, the Free  City of Danzig. It carried out a plebiscite in the disputed districts of  Eupen and Malmédy, awarding both to Belgium. It had a far harder task to  achieve settlements of the Polish-Lithuanian disputes over Vilna and Memel  and even more over the Council’s 1922 boundary award on the impossible  German-Polish disputes over the future of Upper Silesia, where the two  populations lived cheek by jowl. Rejecting British and Turkish arguments,  it decided in 1924 that the former Ottoman province of Mosul should go to  Iraq—and Britain accepted. Although there was much grumbling (and, in the  case of the division of Upper Silesia, nationalist fury in Germany), Zara  Steiner is surely correct in remarking that the League’s participation in  these tricky disputes “made it easier for the loser to accept unwelcome  judgements.”8\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Other positive aspects of the League’s political endeavors are worth  noting. The first was the insistence (chiefly by the Anglo-Americans at  Versailles) upon the recognition and protection of ethnic rights. This was  first pushed upon the new Polish regime in 1919 (including the recognition  of Jewish rights), then extended to a slew of other new states in Central  and Southeastern Europe. There were complaints against this double  standard of requiring only new states to be fair in their treatment of  minorities, although it was also true that pogroms and other injustices  were most likely to occur in recently established and precarious nations  such as Albania, Latvia, Poland, and Yugoslavia. There was no need to  require, say, Norway to preserve the rights of ethnic minorities. Not all,  or many, of the thirteen states that had recognized minorities as  “collective entities” carried out their League pledges. But at least they  knew they were under some sort of international scrutiny.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In an ironic way, so, too, were the imperial Great Powers themselves  subject to scrutiny, since in the Versailles arrangements they had agreed  to inspect—or at least to report on—their “mandated” territories, those  lands seized from the German and Turkish empires during the First World  War. The British complied best, though coolly. The French hated any  oversight of what they were doing in Syria and Lebanon. And the Japanese  simply refused all requests to report on how they were administering the  central Pacific islands they had seized from Germany in 1914. Still,  however unevenly the mandate reports turned out to be in practice,  precedents were being set regarding accountability to some higher body  than the nation-state.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The third area in which advances occurred in the international   system lay outside the League itself, in a set of Great Power treaties,  very much in Bismarckian style. Yet they were significant nonethe-  less. In 1921–22, the United States, the British Empire, Japan, France,  and Italy signed a series of accords in Washington, D.C. These were very  detailed agreements upon comparative naval strengths, forti-  fied bases, and respect for China’s independence, along with solemn  pledges for perpetual peace in the Far East. The real point to note is  that, while producing the first ever treaty to limit naval strength (not  only in overall numbers of various classes of warship, but in their  displacement and the size of their guns) and being thus in its way a  remarkable breakthrough in arms negotiations, it was still an “old boy”  deal, as among the five largest naval powers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The same might be said about the famous 1925 Treaties of Locarno. This was  the contract that was widely supposed at the time to have “buried” the  First World War. Germany, France, and Belgium agreed to recognize their  1919 boundaries in Europe and not transgress them—a critical French  anxiety. Britain and Italy declared they would take up arms against any or  each of the three prime signatories that violated the deal. Locarno was,  alas, full of inconsistencies, but it didn’t seem to matter.9 There was  general rejoicing at this act of reconciliation. In the giddy age of the  mid-1920s, all was well in the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This frivolity was driven by a fourth factor, the remarkable (and yet  fragile) economic recovery of the era. Europe had of course been badly  hurt by the First World War, and the years immediately following were  grim. But the economic stabilization projects regarding war debts and  reparations (the Dawes Plan of 1924 and the Young Committee of 1929), plus  the flow of short-term American investments into Europe during the 1920s,  created a minor miracle. Industries such as automobiles, aircraft, and  chemicals boomed. Housing starts were up, and the middle classes began  touring abroad again. The new system of peace seemed to be working.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yet for all the hopes placed in the League, and the various advances made  in the growth of international civic society after 1919, the system failed  within less than two decades of its founding. Perhaps no global machinery  for keeping the peace could have survived the lingering ideological  hatreds, economic dislocations, and primal passions that coexisted with  the Locarno optimism. But the League was in any case cruelly flawed from  its inception, and as the 1920s moved into the 1930s, its weaknesses  became more and more evident.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To begin with, it was never a real world organization, only a partial one.  About half of the globe was still in a condition of colonial dependency,  lacking representation (and at least two advanced nations, Japan and  Italy, were out to increase their imperial holdings). The vast Russian  lands, torn by civil war and then transformed into the mysterious,  isolated Soviet Union, had no place in the system—  indeed, although Moscow joined certain technical agencies, it regarded the  League itself as a form of capitalist conspiracy that had to be opposed  (until, that is, the mid-1930s, when the USSR deftly joined the  organization following Germany’s departure). Japan paid mere lip service  to the League. The defeated Germany was not allowed membership until 1926;  Hitler marched it out in 1933. That was a seven-year stint, beaten only in  its brevity by that of the Soviet Union, which was expelled in early 1940  after its invasion of Finland—the one country to be voted out of  membership of the League. Wilson had argued years earlier that only  nations committed to democracy should be members of the League; he would  have been sorely disappointed at the list of those within the club by the  mid-1930s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Most important, the Geneva-based body lacked American participation as a  result of Wilson’s angry confrontation with, and defeat by, the U.S.  Senate. Thus, the country that had pushed hardest for the creation of an  international security system—and by that time was the most powerful  nation on the planet—was absent from the world stage. Not only was it  absent; its actions, and more often its inaction, operated as a drag upon  efforts at international cooperation. Its angry demands for the repayment  of Allied war debts soured transatlantic relations throughout the 1920s  and complicated negotiations over German reparations. Its wariness during  the 1931–34 Manchurian crisis prevented any possible coordinated action by  the West that might have made Japan act more cautiously. Its continued  trading with Italy (especially in oil supplies) during the Abyssinian  crisis of 1935–36 caused a worried British government to drop the idea of  a total commercial blockade of Mussolini’s Fascist regime. And Roosevelt’s  habit in the late 1930s of encouraging Britain and France to be stalwart  against Hitler’s aggressions while at the same time publicly insisting  upon American neutrality drove Neville Chamberlain crazy.10 This was not  helpful at all.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304735166693,"sku":"NP9780375703416","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375703416.jpg?v=1767740874","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-parliament-of-man-isbn-9780375703416","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}