The UN and the Postwar Global Order

Dumbarton Oaks in Historical Perspective after 75 Years

Bibliographic Data

ID10074542
AuthorsJ Simon Rofe (0000-0001-9423-6644, SOAS, University of London UK, corresponding author), Giles Scott-Smith (0000-0002-9089-7194, University of Leiden, Netherlands), Tom Zeiler (University of Colorado Boulder)
Year2019
Volume54
Issue2
Pages256-264
Publication date2019-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0022009417742708
OpenAlexW2940369527
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited10

The history of 'Dumbarton Oaks' is overshadowed in the formation of the postwar order, most notably by the San Francisco conference of April 1945 that gave birth to the United Nations Organisation.Yet in a number of important ways it was the Dumbarton Oaks conference, or the "Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization" to give it its full and formal title, that fundamentally shaped a "postwar international organisation".In other words, the United Nations, an omnipresent feature of international affairs since 1945, owes a considerable debt to the gathering in the late summer and early autumn of 1944.The Conversations took place in stressed circumstances, with the military outcome of the war still far from determined, 1 the importance of individual national interests for the protagonists, and the competing viewpoints on an international organisation in the aftermath of the experience of the League of Nations all playing a role.Nonetheless all present understood the opportunity that existed in the late summer of 1944.That the United Nations Organisation has had a mixed record since should not cloud assessments of the scale of the achievement at Dumbarton Oaks to produce a meaningful blueprint for a universal international organisation.1 The military situation from August-October 1944 was pressing: the Allies failed with Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands to break through on the Western front; Soviet forces were unable or unwilling to offer support to the Warsaw uprising, leaving the Poles to face Nazi Germany's reprisals in the city; in the Pacific US forces were meeting strong resistance from Japanese forces.If the outcome of the war was fairly certain, the end of the war was -militarily -still some way off in the autumn of 1944.Dumbarton Oaks' place in the panoply of wartime conferences has suffered in comparison with other UN-related gatherings such as Bretton Woods and Hot Springs that led to more readily identifiable results.Dumbarton Oaks, in contrast, was an interim meeting on the way to something bigger, a 'pre-summit meeting'. 2 The value of the accounts presented here is that they reveal the essential wider context and the broader implications to those policy negotiations.It was the practical policy outcomes that were so important to the delegates from the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom that joined those from the United States in their secluded Washington surroundings from 21 August -28 September (the Chinese nationalist delegation joined the second phase of the conversations from 29 September to 8 October).The articles gathered here indicate how national interests both shaped and were shaped by the emerging international organization for the post-war world.This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History re-evaluates the significance of those meetings in the Georgetown suburbs of Washington DC for the history of global governance.The Dumbarton Oaks estate provided a suitable retreat for the delegates in 1944 who deliberated on the future international organisation

Art · Economics · Order (exchange · Perspective (graphical · Political science · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · History

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