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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The British Foreign Office and the creation of the United Nations Organization, 1941- 1945 Ehrhardt, Andrew Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 26. Sep. 2021 The British Foreign Office and the Creation of the United Nations Organization, 1941 - 1945 Andrew Ehrhardt Doctoral Thesis Department of War Studies, King’s College London November 2020 Abstract This thesis examines Foreign Office planning for a post-war international organisation during the Second World War. It begins with Britain’s search for war aims in 1939 and 1940 and ends with the signing of the United Nations Charter in June 1945. Three officials—namely Alexander Cadogan, Gladwyn Jebb and Charles Webster—are identified as the key figures behind the planning and negotiating stages. The thesis shines light on the indispensable contribution of these men as well as the Foreign Office in the creation of the United Nations Organization, arguing that the British role in this process has not been given its due weight in existing accounts. The thesis is best understood as a study of statecraft, based on archival research and using traditional methods of diplomatic history. It drills down further into the practice of ‘planning’, which became more important in Western foreign policy in this era, and it aims to draw out what contemporaries called a ‘grand strategy for peace’. More specifically, it describes a distinct method and approach of those British diplomats who were attempting to construct and craft the mechanics of the post-war international order (of which Cadogan, Jebb and Webster were the best exemplars). This approach relied heavily on a historical sensibility as it sought to square the competing notions of national interest, power politics and internationalism. While it does not lend itself to neat categorisation, their thinking and approach is described in this thesis as a form of ‘realist-internationalism’. This particular approach grew out of the experience of the failure of the League of Nations and reflected a ‘great power’ view of international relations rooted in a specific reading of nineteenth-century diplomatic history. It was characterised by an attempt to place the British national interest, including the preservation of the Empire, into an internationalist frame. Table of Contents Introduction 4 1. Jebb, Webster, Cadogan and the Early Stages of Foreign Office Planning, 1939 - 1941 47 2. A ‘Concert of the World’: Foreign Office Post-war planning begins, 1942 89 3. The United Nations Plan for Organising Peace and Welfare, January – July 1943 123 4. The Balancing Act of a Great Power Peace, August – December 1943 160 5. Making the Machine: Planning for the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, January – July 1944 188 6. Delivering on the plans: Dumbarton Oaks, the Veto Question, and a Western Security Group, August 1944 - January 1945 222 7. The Final Push: Yalta and San Francisco Conferences, February – June 1945 254 Conclusion 289 Bibliography 301 3 Introduction On a mild January afternoon in London in 1946, the first session of the United Nations General Assembly was called to order. Rising to speak in Westminster Central Hall was Dr Zuleta Angel of Colombia, the chairman of the first assembly. To his immediate right on stage was Gladwyn Jebb, the Acting Secretary General of the United Nations.1 Below them were representatives from the 51 countries who had signed the United Nations Charter just over six months earlier, on 26 June 1945. In the audience was Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under- Secretary at the Foreign Office and Britain’s soon-to-be first Permanent Representative to the United Nations, as well as Charles Kingsley Webster, on leave from his professorship at the London School of Economics and now advisor to the Minister of State at the Foreign Office.2 For Jebb, Cadogan and Webster, the start of the proceedings marked the end of a planning process that had consumed almost all of their energy during the war. Only eighteen months before the first General Assembly, these three Foreign Office officials had sat down with their American, Russian and later, Chinese counterparts to negotiate the creation of an international organisation in the post-war period. There, the British plans which had been designed—mostly by Jebb, Webster and members of the Foreign Office’s Economic and Reconstruction Department—over the previous two years were presented by Cadogan, then the head of the British delegation to the conference. That meeting, which took place on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., between August and October 1944, marked the substantive origins of what would become the United Nations Organization. Even then, the story was far from complete. Deep-seated differences emerged and were remedied at the Yalta 1 Gladwyn Jebb: Private Secretary to Permanent Under-Secretary of State, 1937-40; Ministry of Economic Warfare, 1940-42; Head of the Economic and Reconstruction Department, 1942-45. The thesis will only mention the wartime positions of officials in the Foreign Office. 2 Alexander Cadogan: Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, 1938-46. Charles Kingsley Webster: Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, 1932–53; Foreign Research and Press Service, 1939-41, 1942-43; Director, British Library of Information in New York, 1941-42; Foreign Office Research Department, 1943-44; Economic and Reconstruction Department, 1944-45 4 Conference in February 1945, with the final details agreed upon at the San Francisco Conference later that summer. It had been an arduous process, yet one of great and lasting importance. Now each man, whether seated on stage or in the audience, could look upon the inaugural gathering in Westminster’s Central Hall with some relief and a sense of pride in knowing they had served invaluable roles in the making of a new international system to improve peaceful cooperation among nations. Understanding as they did the fate of the League of Nations and thinking back to previous precedents such as the Congress system established in 1815, they were also hopeful that the institution they had designed would prove more enduring. Despite their contributions, surprisingly little has been written about the work of these Foreign Office officials and their colleagues during the Second World War. The bulk of the historical accounts of the creation of the United Nations Organization focuses instead on the role of the United States. Moreover, when historians have addressed the British influence, much of the attention has been on the roles of Winston Churchill and his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, as opposed to the diplomats most responsible for the planning, drafting and negotiating. In this story, insofar as it is known, the less glamorous but essential work of bureaucratic statecraft—including the half-formed memorandum that never made it to the conference table, the wasted efforts and wrong turns—is often submerged. The statecraft of planning and peacebuilding was both a worthwhile endeavour and sometimes a murky and byzantine process in which ideas, interests and personalities were all intermixed—within and between the nation states involved. This thesis is the first sustained and dedicated treatment of the planning for a post-war international organisation that was undertaken by officials in the British Foreign Office during the Second World War. In terms of its chronological scope, the study begins with the search for war aims between 1939 and 1940—the launch pad of post-war planning efforts—and ends 5 with the signing of the United Nations Charter in June 1945. Over the course of nearly four years, as officials in the Foreign Office sought to ensure that the British national interest was secured and advanced in the post-war international system, planning for and negotiating an international organisation became an increasingly important foreign policy priority. Although their importance waxed and waned at different stages of this process, the thesis pivots around the roles of three officials in particular—Alexander Cadogan, Gladwyn Jebb and Charles Webster—arguing that they played the most important roles on the British side. While the thesis shines light on the indispensable contribution of Britain and the Foreign Office in the creation of the United Nations Organization, it serves, more importantly, as a study of statecraft and an insight into the way in which diplomats attempted to construct and craft the mechanics and structures of the post-war international order. Using the language of one contemporary diplomat, what emerges is nothing less than a British ‘grand strategy for peace’. This was an approach that was born in the worst period of the war—between 1941 and 1942—but which consciously sought to look beyond the military struggle and which, after coming to fruition between 1945 and 1946, created structures that served their intended purpose for many years thereafter.