United Nations Conference on International Organization, 1945 CHARTER

It is 1945, and the deadliest war in human history is finally coming to a close. Allied forces have pushed the Third Reich back within Germany’s pre-war borders, and the Americans are readying themselves for a brutal invasion of the main Japanese islands. At the same time, the world leaders—primarily Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (later, Harry Truman) of the United States, and Winston ChurchUnited Nations Conference on International Organization, 1945ill (later, Clement Attlee) of the United Kingdom—were preparing for the post-war world. As the Western allies were preparing to coordinate their capitalist sphere of influence against the Soviet Union and their Eastern bloc, there was an overriding concern from both sides of how future international conflicts could be resolved peacefully, without the need for a war on the scale of World War Two. The League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, was born from the ashes of World War One and served as a model for how an international organization could work. The only problem was that the League of Nations was a failure as it did not coordinate countries effectively against aggressors and lacked backing from the United States and the Soviet Union. As a result, for the new United Nations to work, it would not only need the backing of all of the great powers, but it would also need a strong enforcement mechanism.

Our role in this committee will be to explore how to structure the United Nations to solve the fundamental issues in the modern world which require international cooperation. We will have debates on Realist and Liberal international relations theory and will examine the history of the interwar period to see why the League failed. We will end the committee with a functional United Nations, or an agreement to have no such organization at all.

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