B5, key topic 3 - Founding the UN and its work to 1964

Founding And Charter

The United Nations was set up in the final year of the Second World War. Leaders and diplomats wanted to avoid another collapse into global war, but they also remembered why the League of Nations had struggled: some powerful states had stayed outside it or ignored it, and the League had lacked the force and unity needed to stop aggression in the 1930s.

The UN Charter was drawn up at the San Francisco Conference in 1945. Representatives from 50 countries took part. The Charter was adopted on 25 June 1945, signed on 26 June, and came into force on 24 October 1945 after ratification by China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and a majority of the other signatories. That date is treated as the official start of the United Nations.

The Charter gave the UN four broad purposes:

This was more ambitious than a simple peace conference. The UN tried to combine security, diplomacy, development, health, food, education, labour standards, refugees, children and human rights into one wider international system.

But there was a compromise at the heart of the Charter. If the great powers had not been given a special role, they might not have joined or obeyed the organisation. If they were given too much power, the UN could become stuck whenever those powers disagreed. The Charter therefore made the UN stronger than the League in some ways, but also tied its strongest enforcement powers to great-power cooperation.

Misconception check: the UN was not created because the League had done nothing useful. Some League agencies and ideas continued. The UN was created because the League's political security system had failed to stop major war, and the post-1945 world needed a wider and more permanent structure.

Organs And Veto

The UN's structure mattered because different parts of the organisation had different types of power. Students often blur the General Assembly and Security Council together, but they did very different jobs.

At its creation, the Security Council had five permanent members: the USA, USSR, Britain, France and China. These were the major Allied powers from the Second World War. They had a veto over substantive Security Council decisions. This was not an accidental weakness. It was a deliberate bargain. The great powers were expected to carry the heaviest responsibility for security, so they insisted they should not be forced into action against their vital interests.

The veto created a double effect. On one side, it helped keep the great powers inside the UN. That was a lesson from the League, which had suffered when the USA never joined and when other powers withdrew or ignored it. On the other side, the veto could paralyse the UN in exactly the situations where action was most needed. During the Cold War, the USA and USSR often saw crises through rival ideological and strategic interests.

The secretary-general could still matter. Trygve Lie, Dag Hammarskjold and U Thant each had to work with the limits of the Charter. Hammarskjold was especially important because he developed a more active style of diplomacy and peacekeeping in the 1950s and early 1960s. But even an energetic secretary-general could not simply order states to obey.

The most important structural judgement is this: the UN was stronger than the League because it had permanent machinery, universal ambition and the participation of the great powers. It was weaker than its ideals because it still depended on those same powers agreeing, paying, contributing forces and accepting decisions.

Agencies And Rights

The UN was not only a peace-and-war organisation. Much of its early work was done through human-rights bodies, refugee work and specialised agencies. This mattered because the UN could sometimes make progress in social and humanitarian work even when the Security Council was blocked by Cold War politics.

The Human Rights Commission was set up under the UN's Economic and Social Council in 1946. Its most famous early achievement was helping to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly on 10 December 1948. The declaration did not instantly make states respect rights, but it created an international standard. It showed that the UN connected peace to the treatment of individuals, not just to borders and treaties.

Specialised agencies and programmes gave the UN system practical reach:

The specification also refers to the Mandates Commission. Be careful with this phrase. The League of Nations had a Permanent Mandates Commission, but the UN did not simply carry that exact League body forward unchanged. The UN replaced the old mandate supervision idea with the International Trusteeship System and the Trusteeship Council. These supervised trust territories and pushed them towards self-government or independence. The broader point is continuity and change: the UN inherited some League-style international supervision, but reshaped it for the age of decolonisation.

Disarmament was another early area. The UN Disarmament Commission was created in 1952 to prepare proposals for limiting and reducing armed forces and armaments, including weapons of mass destruction. This showed the UN's ambition, but also its limits. Nuclear rivalry and Cold War mistrust made disarmament extremely difficult.

For exam answers, do not treat agencies as a sideshow. They are evidence that the UN's work was wider than Security Council crises. A strong judgement might say that the UN struggled to enforce peace when great powers disagreed, but it had more success building long-term international cooperation through agencies, refugees, health, food, labour, education, children and human rights.