America, Hitler and the UN: How the Allies Won World War II and Forged a Peace. By Dan Plesch. I.B. Tauris; 256 pages; $35 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
《美国，希特勒和联合国：联盟军是如何赢得二战并逐步走向和平》，Dan Plesch著，I.B.Tauris出版；256页；35美元，20英镑。Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk有售
THE United Nations began soon after the second world war, at a conference in San Francisco, in a blaze of never-again idealism, amid hopes that all future aggressors could be nipped in the bud. That is what most people with a vague knowledge of diplomacy think they remember.
In fact, as Dan Plesch, a British historian and security analyst, points out in this closely argued and compelling book, “America, Hitler and the UN”, both the term “United Nations” and the ideal it embodied go back further. To see how much further, read The Economist of January 31st 1942, which reported that “the most comprehensive system of international association the world has yet seen” was in prospect after talks between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt on cementing the anti-Axis alliance. The problem, we noted, was how “to mobilise the resources of all the United Nations”.
It was Roosevelt who had coined the term “United Nations” a few weeks earlier. When it occurred to him, he rushed, in his wheelchair, to Churchill’s bedroom in the White House; he was eager to share his idea with his British guest, who was busy drying himself. “Good!” said the prime minister, whose naked form reminded Roosevelt of a “pink cherub”.
This was more than bathroom banter. Roosevelt understood—even in those very early weeks of his stand-off against Japan—that the war must be pursued not in the name of narrow national interests, but for some broader ideal. The raw material already existed. In August 1941, when America was still neutral, Roosevelt and Churchill had issued an Atlantic Charter, speaking of free trade, non-aggression and democracy. That language fed into a declaration issued on New Year’s Day, 1942, in the name of the “United Nations”, consisting of America, Britain, the Soviet Union and 23 other governments that had lined themselves up against the Axis.
Mr Plesch argues that the best features of the post-1945 order—not just the UN, but also the Bretton Woods agreements and Marshall Plan—have their roots in the relatively disinterested economic and military solidarity which the “United Nations” showed one another in the heat of war.
For anyone probing the origins of today’s global order, the book’s most interesting parts have to do with international justice. Here again, it argues, conventional wisdom misleads. Most people assume that the post-1945 understanding of crimes against humanity has its origins in the trials of Nuremburg and Tokyo; the International Criminal Court (ICC), to which most countries, though not America, Russia or China, now belong, is seen as a child of Nuremburg.
Mr Plesch corrects this half-truth. The real antecedent of today’s war-crimes tribunals is an honourable but little-known body that was established in October 1943 and closed in 1948—the 17-nation United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). With a secretariat in London, this small, robust agency worked to establish the idea that “war crimes” could include atrocities perpetrated by tyrants against their own citizens. However obvious that might seem now, the notion was resisted by those in Britain and America who felt that it violated an ancient principle of non-interference in other countries’ domestic affairs. But the commission fought back, drawing moral support from Jewish and Christian leaders, and the exiled governments of small European states. In some ways stronger than today’s ICC, the commission was a clearing house for evidence on war crimes, and a debating forum for the definition of such crimes; above all it helped national courts to try egregious atrocities.
The commission’s files, now in New York, are hard to access. Mr Plesch believes its closure in 1948 reflects a change in policy by Germany’s American occupiers who in 1947, for example, recruited a former Gestapo chief, Klaus Barbie, as an agent.
The book argues convincingly that the work of the UNWCC was in many ways more important than that of the Nuremburg tribunal. But what does that imply for international justice 60 years later, as the ICC still struggles to achieve credibility? Some may simply conclude that today’s Hague-based court needs boosting. But perhaps a better way of honouring the UNWCC would be to emulate its best achievement: offering practical support to national judiciaries which are struggling, against multiple odds, to deal with war crimes committed on their soil. In 2011, as in 1943, efforts to outlaw and punish the most horrific deeds need to be pragmatic, and well-adapted to local realities, as well as spectacular and utopian.
