World War II and Plans for Post-War Order

Abstract

One theme indispensable to an understanding of the Cold War is the contrast between two clashing views of world order: the ‘universalist’ view, by which all nations shared a common interest in all the affairs of the world, and the ‘sphere-of-influence’ view, by which each great power would be assured by the other great powers of an acknowledged predominance in its own area of special interest. The universalist view assumed that national security would be guaranteed by an international organization. The sphere-of-interest view assumed that national security would be guaranteed by the balance of power. While in practice these views have by no means been incompatible (indeed, our shaky peace has been based on a combination of the two), in the abstract they involved sharp contradictions. [1] The conflict in post-war international politics between these two views had its origins in the Second World War. Each of the allied powers had different ideas concerning the place of spheres of influence in post-war order and when it became apparent that spheres of influence would be a legacy of the war, the allies began to clash. During the war and for a time at the end of it, the contradictions between the allied powers were obscured by the principles and common aims to which each subscribed. These were set out in the Atlantic Charter, the Declaration of the United Nations and later in the Four-Power Declaration of General Security. Of these the Atlantic Charter was the most important.