Edward Johnson

The Foreign Office and Preparing for the First United Nations Conference on Trade and Development

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was established in 1964 as a forum to negotiate and regulate international trade policy. From the perspective of the British Government, the question of holding a conference was not initially attractive. There were a number of reasons for this, as the following analysis makes clear, but the Foreign Office came around to supporting the idea in part because there was a significant measure of international support for the conference and also because it was more important to try to influence the outcome of any agreements made at the Conference rather than be in semi-isolation as a grudging opponent outside it. In preparing for the first UNCTAD, the Foreign Office, with the Board of Trade, took the major role in policy formation and it became clear that the Foreign Office was intent upon taking the initiative seriously.

Baigorri-Jalón, J. (2014). From Paris to Nuremberg: The Birth of Conference Interpreting

At first glance, this might not appear to be a volume which students of diplomatic history would rush to pick from the shelves. Yet they would be missing a great deal if they did not. It is a fascinating book, translated from Spanish, in which the author sets out to examine the development of interpreting and translating at international conferences in the first half of the twentieth century. It is the product of research in the League of Nations archives in Geneva and of the extensive use of memoirs and diaries and its theme is how conference interpreting moved from a rather makeshift set of arrangements at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to the eventual development and operation of simultaneous interpretation at the Nuremberg War Trials between 1945–46. The work is in five chapters beginning with the Paris Conference then covering the experience of the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization in two chapters. There is also a separate chapter on the role of interpreters in translating for the dictators of the inter-war period where they became part of the entourage of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin and were closely associated with the respective regimes. The book concludes with the post-war Nuremberg Trials where four languages, English, French, German, and Russian were used and where large scale simultaneous interpreting came to the fore and set a standard in international forums and diplomacy. Prior to the Paris Conference, French was the universal language of diplomacy and thus translating and interpreting were not formally necessary. This changed in 1919 with the rise of English as a rival language to French. A number of circumstances were responsible as Baigorri-Jalón shows. Not all the wartime leaders who assembled at Versailles were schooled in French: neither Lloyd George nor Woodrow Wilson spoke the language whereas Clemenceau did speak English—he was married to an American. In addition any peace agreement would need to be presented to the US Senate and would have to be in English. While French was the diplomatic language of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the role of the English speaking peoples in the Great War was a major factor in the acceptance of English

Staur, C. (2013).Shared Responsibility: The United Nations in the Age of Globalization: Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, xv + 315 pp.,

This work is clearly written from the standpoint of a UN insider. Carsten Staur was Denmark’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York from 2007 to 2013 and later to its Geneva headquarters, and here he aims to show, as the title indicates, that in an age of globalization, the UN still has a key role to play in the international community. However, in doing so, it will have to share its responsibilities over the next ten to fifteen years with, amongst others, some emerging global powers, non-state actors with extensive reach such as multi-national corporations, international media groups, and a range of NGOs, aid and human rights organizations. In this position of shared responsibility, Staur sees the significance of the UN retained in two ways: in setting standards and defining objectives of behaviour within the international community as well as being a source of practical help for those more vulnerable states, especially those seeking to avoid conflict or recovering from its effects. In coming to this conclusion, Staur sets the recent record of the UN as a base from which to argue a future agenda for the organization. The book is divided into five parts, the first two of which cover the structure of the UN, with the focus on the Security Council, the General Assembly, and the Secretariat and the peace and security role—much of which would have found a place in any text written during the Cold War. It is the other three parts on Freedom, Development, and Perspectives that reflect what the author sees as greater challenges for the UN and by extension greater opportunities which have arisen since 1989. This structure is set against four “global mega-trends toward 2025” which the author covers in the Introduction and which provide the backdrop for the UN over the next generation. While basing analysis on “trends” is always a perilous path, even the most hardened sceptic of future thinking would find it difficult to argue with Staur’s categories, given that at least four are already plainly visible in the international community. These he sees as: a changing global power structure to include states of rising political significance such as China, Brazil and India; a global struggle over different value systems; the further rise of non-state actors seeking a role in the international community; and finally

26.96, £32.00.

This tightly packed volume is the fifty-second in the Routledge Global Institutions series which aims to provide a set of accessible and comprehensive guides to the history, structure, and roles of international bodies. It takes as its starting point that the idea of a single political organization for the whole world—a world government for a world state—is something which has intrigued political thinkers from, as the title indicates, ancient times. Yunker aims to assess the feasibility of world government and test the proposition held by many that world government is not merely impractical but also dangerous, by examining a range of ideas for world government and presenting his own proposal at the end of the work. The majority of this short work’s focus is on plans beginning with the seventeenth century French writer, Emeric Cruce’s, The New Cyneas (1623) through to a 2003 article by Alexander Wendt on the inevitability of a world state. In between the author lays out a selection of the proposals for world government and sets them against the political and military context in which they were written. If there is a weakness in the book, it is that for parts, the context outweighs the discussion or even description of the various plans to the extent that we are given only a brief explanation of those on which the author decides to focus. The first chapter examines the historical antecedents of world government through the conceptual overlap with Empires: both involve the construction of authoritative government covering a range of states and differing populations. But empires have generally been fused through military subjugation and Yunker is more interested in world government through contract, plans, consent, and accommodation rather than through conquest. Even when looking at these, the book does recognise that many of the early plans for world government were in fact little more than calls for alliances of states and kingdoms within Europe as a means of preserving peace, although Cruce’s work in the seventeenth century did differ in wishing to encompass all the known regions of the world. The contract form of world government, characterised by a supranational body, is evident in Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch

Yunker, J. A. (2011). The Idea of World Government: From Ancient Times to the Twenty-First Century

International organizations traditionally have been something of the Cinderella in the study of international politics and international and diplomatic history; not always given the prominence that perhaps they might warrant. This is especially the case for those scholars from the realist school, for whom the key driver of international politics is the nationstate and its decision makers. International organizations are merely vehicles through which the actions of states are directed and even then not always very significantly. They are rather like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Hamlet, side-players in the wings not fully central to an understanding of the subject matter of international politics. This comprehensive history by Bob Reinalda counters any such view of international organizations, which includes International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) and NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs) both global and regional in scope, as at all peripheral to a wider understanding of international politics over the past two centuries. It shows the range of activities of the hundreds of international organizations within international society and illustrates their failings as well as their successes. It is a mine of useful and fascinating reference from the starting point of modern international organizations right up to the effect of the 2007–8 credit crisis on international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). While it progresses in a chronological fashion, it does so through three broad themes: the role of international organizations on security, their significance in terms of the management of economic and social affairs, and their responsibility in the promotion of humanitarianism which has been a recurrent factor in contemporary international politics and one enhanced since the end of the Cold War. The work is organized in seventeen parts from the beginning of the nineteenth century and the invention of the multilateral conference, the responsibility for which is laid at the door of the British who wished, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, to restore a stable and profitable

B. Reinalda (2009). Routledge History of International Organizations: From 1815 to the Present Day

This article examines the 1960 soviet attack on Dag Hammarskjold and its proposal to reform the office of the UN Secretary-General into a troika and the Soviet lines, the article seeks to show that the British had sufficiant concerns about the direction Hammarskjold was taking the office of Secretary-General to be more in line with Soviet attitudes than they would have been willing to admit publicly. British support for Hammarskjold in the Congo crisis was not unqualified and the article notes that following Hammarskjolds death, it was not Britains interest to see Hammarskjolds successor being given the political freedom he had enjoyed.

The British and the 1960 soviet attack on the office of united nations secretary-general

From 1954 to 1958, the Greek government sought to raise the issue of self‐determination for Cyprus at the United Nations as a means of pressing for the union of the island with the Greek state ‐ enosis. The British governments objective was to ensure if possible that Cyprus was not debated using the legal argument that it was a domestic issue in which the UN had no rights. The British accepted, however, that other political and strategic arguments would be needed to defeat the Greeks and looked to the US government to support them in the UN forums. This article examines the positions of the British and Americans governments and shows the difficulties which the issue created for both in the UN in the period.