No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations

For all the scholarly attention that the United Nations (UN) has generated in its sixty-five years of existence, serious historical studies have been few. Recently, however, the transnationalism vogue has coincided with a revival of interest in international organisations. The title of Mark Mazower's book—and its cover illustration of bowler-hatted and besuited men standing as if enchanted by the ruins of a classical civilisation—situates it within the strand of this new historiography keen to challenge the morality-tale version of internationalism. Mazower continues his career-defining ‘dark continent’ theme of Europe's place in the making of the modern world and serves up an anti-history of twentieth-century internationalism. His corrective to conventional (American) histories of the origins of the UN rooted in the after-shock of the Second World War and populated with American actors and values, focuses on the longue durée influence of British imperial ideology and ideologists. Mazower works backwards from the founding United Nations Conference on International Organisation, held in San Francisco in 1945, to the early twentieth century. There he finds a generation of British liberals whose chauvinist conceptions of civilisational and race difference informed the creation of the League of Nations and then the UN. Jan Smuts, the South African military and political leader, and the progressives’ hero in 1919, ends up in San Francisco lending his stilted pen to the UN Charter's preamble. Mazower exposes Smuts as a proponent of the superiority of white British civilisation in South Africa, and, in this sense, the harbinger of apartheid rule. The English classicist Alfred Zimmern was involved in the League of Nations’ International Intellectual Cooperation Organisation, and drove the war-time push for the creation of UNESCO. Mazower shows us that Zimmern pushed for the parallels between Classical Athenian civilisation, Britain's imperial destiny, and the cultural mission of international institutions.