Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  Before the war, Urquhart had been excited by the League of Nations. His internationalist enthusiasm had been inspired, he recalls, by his childhood connection to a private girls’ boarding school, Badminton, run by an eccentric headmistress named Miss Beatrice M. Baker, known to all as BMB. Urquhart’s mother taught at Badminton School. His aunt Lucy was the formidable BMB’s partner, in the school and in life. At the age of six, Urquhart was the only little boy among more than two hundred girls. BMB’s sympathies were very much on the left. Like many people at the time, she took a benign view of “Uncle Joe” Stalin. BMB also took in Jewish refugees from the Continent during the 1930s, not something most private boarding school headmistresses would have done at the time. She even made her girls, including my mother, who was a pupil during the war, march through the streets of Bristol under banners that read “Workers of the World Unite!”

  After the war was over, Urquhart was briefly taken on by the historian Arnold Toynbee in a special department at the Foreign Office set up to gather intelligence from Nazi-occupied Holland. Since Holland was no longer under Nazi occupation, there was nothing much to do—a small example of the many bureaucratic oddities left over from the war. This assignment didn’t last long, however. Urquhart’s next employer was Gladwyn Jebb, the British diplomat in charge of organizing the recently established United Nations, whose charter he helped draft. For the rest of his professional life, Urquhart remained a loyal servant of that world institution whose ideals continued to move him, even as he viewed its flaws in practice with due skepticism.

  Four decades later he wrote of that heady time in the fall of 1945:

  . . . it is hard to recapture the freshness and enthusiasm of those pioneering days. The war was still vivid in everyone’s mind and experience. Many of us had been in the armed forces, and others had only emerged from underground resistance movements a few months before. To work for peace was a dream fulfilled, and the fact that everything had to be organized from scratch was an additional incentive.2

  One of Urquhart’s closest friends in the UN secretariat was another man mentioned before, the French resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel, who was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo before being sent to Buchenwald and Dora. He was born in 1919, the same year as Urquhart. Hessel, too, had an unusual background. His father, Franz Hessel, a distinguished German writer and translator of Proust, was the model for Jules in Jules et Jim, the story of a fatal Franco-German love triangle, later made into the famous film by François Truffaut. Like Urquhart, Stéphane Hessel wanted to build a better world on a global stage. His ambition was spurred by something more remarkable than the usual loathing of war and longing for peace. He wrote in his memoir that it was “the cosmopolitanism of the concentration camps,” where men from many nations and classes were thrown together, that “pushed me towards diplomacy.”3 Three years after the end of the war, he helped to draft the first Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted in 1948). Hessel died in 2013, at the age of ninety-five.

  No doubt, Urquhart and Hessel were extraordinary men. But their idealism, born from the experience of devastation, was not out of the ordinary. The idea that a new world order had to be built, governed by a global organization, more robust and effective than the League of Nations, was widely believed. Some took this notion very far. Even before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, proponents of world government often spoke in apocalyptic terms. Arnold Toynbee’s pronouncements during the war that a Third World War could be prevented only by a world government, with a worldwide police force, would seem to be on the zany side, but he was taken seriously enough by senior figures in the U.S. State Department. A Gallup poll taken in April 1945 revealed that 81 percent of Americans wanted the U.S. to enter “a world organization with police power to maintain world peace.”4

  Since the concept of world government or world federation was quite vague, thinkers along these lines tended to project their personal ideals on the future. Mahatma Gandhi, not surprisingly, held that a world federation should be based on his principles of nonviolence. Toynbee argued that the worldwide police force, at least for some time to come, should be an Anglo-American operation. The idea was to create a “democratic Anglo-American World Commonwealth.”5 He was not alone. Lord Lothian, the ambassador to Washington in 1939, saw the British Empire as the model for a federal world government. This, too, might strike one as not only self-serving but utterly fanciful. Yet the idea of a kind of liberal Anglo-Saxon hegemony was not unusual in Britain or the U.S. Churchill believed in it for a while. Indeed, the notion still pops up on occasion to feed the self-esteem of English-speaking dreamers, including one or two occupants of the White House.

  The New Yorker writer E. B. White commented in that magazine that San Francisco was just the right place for a conference to draft the first United Nations Charter in the spring of 1945. After all, he said, the “United States is regarded by people everywhere as a dream come true, a sort of world state in miniature.”6 If this kind of smugness feels rather stale today, it, too, has not totally vanished. Even so, E. B. White was quite aware of certain blemishes on the American dreamscape. He noted on May 5, a week after the San Francisco Conference had begun, that somewhere in California “a group of preservationists (we saw by the papers) were attempting to restrict residence in a certain area to ‘people of the Caucasian race.’”7

  Then there were the Europeans, often in the anti-Nazi, antifascist resistance, who saw European unity as the first step towards a united world. Already in 1942, the French resistance group Combat (also known as the Mouvement de Libération Nationale [MLN]) published a manifesto declaring that “The United States of Europe—a stage on the road to world union—will soon be a living reality for which we are fighting.”8 One of the main figures in Combat was Albert Camus, not a man usually given to hyperbole. He was later in close touch with another group of antifascist resisters who issued a manifesto for European unity even earlier, in 1941, from the tiny volcanic island of Ventotene, off the coast of Naples, where Altiero Spinelli and other Italian leftists were incarcerated by Mussolini in a bleak eighteenth-century prison built by the Bourbons. The so-called Ventotene Manifesto, written by one of the prisoners, the political thinker Ernesto Rossi, declared that national politics was for reactionaries, and all progressives should struggle for “a solid international state.” First a federal Europe, then a federal world.

  The ideal of a united Europe is much older, of course, going at least as far back as the Holy Roman Empire in the ninth century. Since then the European ideal went through many changes, but there were two constant themes. One was the ideal of a unified Christendom, with Europe as the spiritual and political core. This goal would remain popular among Catholics—Erasmus for one—and especially French Catholics. Maximilien de Béthune, the duke de Sully (1560–1641), for example, conceived of a Christian European republic which the Turks could join only if they converted to the Christian faith.

  The related ideal was eternal peace. In 1713, another Catholic Frenchman, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, published his “Project for the Creation of Eternal Peace in Europe.” There would be a European senate, a European army, and the larger member-states would have equal voting rights.

  Eternal peace and Christian unity were often identical in the minds of early pan-Europeanists. Peaceful unification was a religious notion, a Christian utopia. Not necessarily meant to be confined to the European continent, it was, like Christianity itself, a universalist aspiration. National borders, ideally, should be abolished in the earthly kingdom of God.

  After the Enlightenment, a new version of this religious universalism was adopted by rationalists with only minor rhetorical changes. The French nineteenth-century poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine wrote a rationalist ode to European unity titled the “Marseillaise of Peace” (1841): “In the course of enlightenment, the world rises to unity / I am the fellow citizen of every thinking person / Truth is my coun
try.” As foreign minister of France in the revolutionary year of 1848, Lamartine published a Manifesto for Europe, promoting the French Republic as a model not just for Europe, but for all mankind.

  A similar switch from religious to rationalist idealism took place at the end of World War II. In 1940, before the U.S. had even joined the war, an outfit called the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America set up a commission to work on a “Just and Durable Peace”—a bit premature, perhaps, but always a subject worth pursuing. Protestant ministers and laymen were sometimes joined by Jews and Catholics in this endeavor. “National missions on world order” were established in major U.S. cities. The need for a world organization was set out in a statement by the commission called the “Six Pillars of Peace.” Lest anyone suspect the statement was the work of idle dreamers, the chairman of the commission was John Foster Dulles, an admirer of Hitler in the early 1930s and a fierce cold warrior in the 1950s when he served as Eisenhower’s secretary of state.

  Dulles played a major role in some very shabby, not to say morally dubious, policies: he supported the French colonial war against the Vietminh nationalists, and he also helped to bring down the democratically elected Iranian government of premier Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953. Mosaddeq was regarded as soft on communism and a threat to Anglo-American oil interests. A coup, engineered by British agents and the CIA, led by Dulles’s brother Allen, was the result. But Dulles’s anticommunism was not only dictated by corporate business. He was a Christian moralist who believed that the war against godless communism was above all a moral enterprise. He also claimed to believe in what he called the “moral power” of the United Nations, and acted as an adviser to the U.S. delegation in San Francisco.9 His response to the use of atomic bombs against Japan might seem unusual, not just for the time, but for a man associated with American conservatism, but it was not untypical of him: “If we, as a professedly Christian nation, feel morally free to use atomic energy in that way, men elsewhere will accept that verdict.”10

  It was indeed the devastation of Hiroshima that changed “one world” rhetoric from something that was often inspired by religious morality to something more secular, and immediate. Scientists were among the first to warn about the implications of a weapon some of them had helped to create. The fearsome explosion of the first atomic bomb in the desert of New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, even prompted a quasi-religious response from Robert Oppenheimer, a leading figure in developing the bomb. He quoted words from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita:

  If the radiance of a thousand suns

  Were to burst at once into the sky,

  That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . .

  Now, I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.

  Einstein’s first words on hearing about the bombing of Hiroshima were more prosaic: “Oh, weh!”11

  Two months later, Einstein cosigned a letter to the New York Times, along with such prominent figures as Senator J. W. Fulbright and Owen J. Roberts, associate justice of the Supreme Court. They wrote, “The first atomic bomb destroyed more than the city of Hiroshima. It also exploded our inherited, outdated political ideas.”12 These ideas included national sovereignty. The United Nations Charter agreed upon in San Francisco was just a beginning, they proclaimed: “We must aim at a Federal Constitution of the world, a working world-wide legal order, if we hope to prevent another atomic war.”

  John Foster Dulles had argued for UN control of nuclear energy, before he changed his mind fast once the Soviet Union exploded its own bomb. Einstein, in an interview published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1945, thought that the “secret of the bomb should be committed to a World Government, and the United States should immediately announce its readiness to give it to a World Government.”

  The case for moral reason was perhaps made most succinctly by that old Christian socialist, the British prime minister, Clement Attlee, in a speech to the Canadian houses of parliament in the same month that Einstein’s interview appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Speaking partly in French, and very much with Hiroshima in mind, Attlee proposed that science and morality had to be brought into harmony. He believed, as the Times of London reported, “that without a moral enthusiasm equal to that which savants bring to their researches, the civilization built over the centuries would be destroyed.”13

  • • •

  THE WAY THE ACTUAL WORLD was beginning to be remade in 1945 might have owed something to the high-minded idealism of former resistance fighters and soldiers for peace, shocked scientists and Christian one-worlders, but not nearly as much as they might have wished. What shaped international institutions after the war (and, in fact, already during the war) was not so much religion or moral ideals, as politics. Since political solutions are never ideal, the new order was bound to be imperfect.

  The origin of the UN Charter that would be worked out in San Francisco was a meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt in Placentia Bay, off the coast of Newfoundland, in August 1941. Britain had survived in the Battle of Britain, if only just. Germany had just invaded the Soviet Union, on June 22, and Pearl Harbor was soon to come (December 7, 1941). Roosevelt was keen to nudge American voters gently towards accepting a more active U.S. role in the European conflict. And so the two leaders arrived on their respective battleships, Roosevelt on the USS Augusta, Churchill on HMS Prince of Wales, to draft an “Atlantic Charter.”

  Curiously, it was Churchill who was keen to include mention of a future world organization in the Charter. Roosevelt, disillusioned by the failure of the League of Nations and nervously aware of domestic resistance to international entanglements, struck out Churchill’s suggestion. Nor was Roosevelt keen on British imperialism, although he did believe, in line with Toynbee, that Britain and the U.S. should jointly police the world for some years. Roosevelt invoked his “Four Essential Human Freedoms,” first announced to the world in January of that same year, as the reasons for fighting fascism. They were immortalized in the sentimental illustrations of Norman Rockwell: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.

  The Atlantic Charter, in fact, turned out to be little more than an elaboration of these fine principles. But one clause did have a significant and long-lasting impact. It was very much the work of the Americans. Not only did the Charter express “the hope that self-government may be restored to those from whom it has been forcibly removed.” It went further: “the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live” would be respected as well.14

  News of this aspiration immediately got through to those who were fighting to be free from colonial empires. Nationalist leaders such as Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Sukarno in Indonesia would quote the words of the Atlantic Charter over and over in their demands for political independence—and for U.S. support. The Algerian protesters in Sétif, who were gunned down on May 8 by French settlers for demanding equality, carried banners that read: “Long Live the Atlantic Charter!”

  Jawaharlal Nehru, in prison for “civil disobedience” when the Atlantic Charter was drawn up, sensed hypocrisy in the Anglo-American pronouncements; he dismissed the Charter as a set of pious platitudes. But in his “Quit India” campaign of the following year, Nehru echoed the Charter’s call for national self-determination. He also called for a “world federation” that would guarantee such rights.

  Churchill had to move fast to reassure Parliament that the right to “self-government” referred only to nations under Nazi occupation. The colonies were an entirely different matter. After all, as he famously remarked in 1942, he had “not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Roosevelt had no time for this kind of bluster, and was sympathetic to Nehru, but did not want to push Churchill too hard while there was still a war on. Churchill, for his part, resented being “school-marmed” by the U.S. on imperial affairs, since the U.S. itself had anything but clea
n hands, notably in the Philippines. This was true enough, but Churchill forgot to mention that the U.S. had already promised independence to the Philippines before the war, a process that was interrupted by the Japanese invasion.

  From the Atlantic Charter, it was but a short step to the United Nations, albeit not yet as a world organization for global security, but as an alliance against the Axis Powers. Twenty-six nations, including China and the Soviet Union, signed up for it in January 1942. Despite his earlier reservations about international organizations, it was Roosevelt who gave the alliance its name, just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Churchill, in a very fine mood, was visiting the White House for a conference code-named “Arcadia.” Roosevelt had been thinking about what to call the new worldwide alliance. Then, before breakfast one day, inspiration hit. Barging into Churchill’s bathroom, he shouted at the prime minister, who was still dripping from his bath: “The United Nations!” And Churchill said it was good.

  The main question, worked on all through the war by bureaucrats, planners, diplomats, and the Allied leaders, was how to transform the wartime alliance into a stable postwar international order for peace. How to avoid another worldwide economic slump. How to stop future Hitlers from starting another world war. And how to do this without stirring up American conservatives, who were quick to brand such international enterprises as the dark doings of “communists.” Whatever the new world organization would look like (Churchill still thought in terms of the “English-speaking peoples,” Stalin of “peace-loving” peoples, and Roosevelt of a harmonious Big Power coalition), it had to have real clout. For that was precisely what the old League of Nations had lacked. The new UN would need the capacity to impose peace, by force if necessary. To assert such authority effectively, the major powers had to get along, hence the conferences in Moscow, Teheran, and Yalta, where the postwar order was thrashed out, sometimes on the back of envelopes, by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, making their moves as though the world were a giant chessboard, with Poles, Greeks, and other peoples, pushed around like pawns.