The United Nations Charter: A Growing Document

Abstract

In 1941, shortly before Pearl Harbor, while in London I met a distinguished group of Britons, who, financed partly by the Government, were engaged in careful research and preparation of plans which were later introduced at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco. Preoccupied as the British were with fighting a war in which at one time they stood all alone, they had time even during the blitz for some people to prepare for a world organization to be an improvement on the League of Nations. I think the major credit for the initiation of the studies in Washington which formed the basis of the plans which went to Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco goes to Sumner Welles. In the summer of 1942 Mr. Welles gathered about him several committees on such subjects as economics, security, and international organization. He gives the facts of these more or less secret committees for the first time in his book, Time for Decision. I well remember the meeting of the committee on international organization. Isaiah Bowman, James T. Shotwell, Benjamin Cohen, Hamilton Fish Armstrong-for part of the time-and I sat together each week with Mr. Welles. It was a great satisfaction to write the ideal constitution of a world organization. I recently looked over my notes of those meetings. I am surprised at how well we kept to reality while we were all putting in some form our favorite ideas. I was most concerned about trusteeship and the principle of automatic membership. Some of us supported an idea which was at one time included in the State Department draft, that there be no such thing as membership in the United Nations. I am rather proud of some memoranda that I drafted at that time in which I urged that the members of the United Nations take the very bold step of proclaiming that, having won a war against the forces that would have destroyed civilization, they were now going to proclaim the law, and the law would be binding upon all the members of the world community. There would be no such thing as application for membership; all nations would automatically be members. Of course, a nation could be denied the privileges of membership. No one .had any thought that Germany and Japan would immediately enjoy the privileges; but they would from the beginning be bound by the law. A citizen of Philadelphia may commit a crime and be sent to jail. He loses the privileges but not the obligations of citizenship in Philadelphia. So nations could be denied the privileges of the world community but still be bound by its law.