2014 came and went without much fanfare. The New York Times that day featured stories on Ebola in Spain, the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriages and the slow recovery of a town ripped apart by racial riots. The Daily Telegraph featured the Islamic State flag near the Turkish border, an increase in the British retirement age and the problem of copycat webpages. In Malaysia, the New Straits Times’ front page was dominated by the effort to rescue the naval patrol boat CB204.
So, what is the significance of Oct 7, you might ask, if not too many people registered the date. For history buffs, you might recognise Oct 7 as the date when the Dumbarton Oaks Conference was concluded, 70 years ago this year.
In 1944, the “Big Four” (China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States) sat down and deliberated on how to bring about an international organisation that could succeed the League of Nations.
For 17 days, top representatives from the four nations closeted themselves in the majestic red-brick mansion that stood in Washington D.C.’s elite neighbourhood of Georgetown. The mansion itself was a research institute under the control of the Trustees for Harvard University; the garden and mansion itself having been donated by former American diplomat Robert Woods Bliss.
When president Franklin D. Roosevelt all but made it his life’s goal to create an international body that would rid the world of any more world wars, Bliss, who was then an assistant to secretary of state Cordell Hull, persuaded his boss to use Dumbarton Oaks for the historic meeting.
Negotiations were made difficult by the fact that even though China and the Soviet Union had agreed to the conference, neither was speaking to the other. So, undersecretary of state Edward Stettinius ended up chairing two meetings — one with the Chinese and the other with the Soviets. But in the end, persistence and tenacity prevailed, and the first spark of a United Nations blueprint was drawn up. It was the beginning of a long road, one which FDR would not live to see.
These days, the UN is a living, breathing entity in midtown Manhattan, which is only dwarfed in visitor numbers by the tourists who flock to the Empire State Building. Its budget for this year was US$5.5 billion (RM18 billion) and it employs more than 43,000 people in its offices around the world.
Has it made a difference, though? It depends on whom you ask. To the child in Uganda where the UN Children’s Fund is battling to deliver clean water, the UN is a Godsend. To the genocide victim in Rwanda, which the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda failed to protect, the UN might as well have not been born.
But we know this. There have been no more world wars on the scale of those in 1914 and 1941. Infant mortality has declined. Access to health services has improved. Literacy is up. Poverty numbers are down. The accountability of governments to their population has increased, thanks to human rights and international law. In a world without the UN to jump-start the campaign, all this might not have been possible.
In the end, it is up to the individual to see the glass as half full or half empty.
President Harry S. Truman, who succeeded FDR, shared his predecessor’s vision for an international organisation that would keep the peace. An avid reader, Truman carried around with him the portion of Tennyson’s Locksley Hall poem that read:
“Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d,
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world,
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.”
The aims and purposes of the UN may be a utopian ideal, but at least they offer a measure of hope that a federation of the world may yet be able to achieve some good.