 are Wednesday seminar series as part of the new voices in global security seminar series sponsored by the School of Security Studies as well as Chatham House's International Affairs Journal. We're really pleased to be welcoming Andrew Eihart today to talk about his research that's coming directly out of his PhD and it's a formulation of a book so we're going to hear portions of his book project today. Andrew is a post-doctorate fellow at the Center of Grand Strategy in the Department of War Studies. I think I'll allow him space to introduce more of himself as he sees fit. The topic or the abstract for his presentation today is the historical scholarship that's focusing on the creation of the United Nations organization tends to be skewed towards the role played by the United States and this often overlooks the influence of the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union to say nothing of other powers from say Australia and New Zealand to Holland and China so Andrew's presentation will focus on the role of the United Kingdom in particular and we'll discuss the ways in which the foreign policy officials work to deliver on plans for a post-war international organization. Among a number of themes is the ways in which these individuals thought about the future of international order and the ways in which they looked to the history of the League of Nations and even the Congress of Vienna for inspiration. So Andrew has agreed to talk for about 30 minutes and then what we'll do is we'll open it up for general questions and comments to you the audience. You have two ways of doing this you can either raise your zoom hand to ask your question live or you can type it into the chat box and I can read it out to Andrew. So without further ado I am going to hand the virtual floor over to you Andrew. Thank you so much Amanda. Thank you for this opportunity and for inviting me to speak and thank you so much for the work that you have done in terms of putting on this seminar series. It's a wonderful opportunity for early career researchers as well as doctoral students so I can't thank you enough for that. Also thanks to Inga who I think is the person that connected me with Amanda but yeah I really owe it to you all in a big way. As Amanda mentioned my name is Andrew Erhart. I'm a postdoc fellow with the Center for Grand Strategy at King's. I recently completed my PhD in the War Studies Department and that was I think November is when I finally finished everything and sent off the copy to the library but that project focused on the foreign office and the creation of the United Nations organization during the Second World War. I'm currently working on a larger project and really to turn that PhD thesis into a book and it's going to expand slightly to include not just the foreign office but the United Kingdom and the creation of the UN from the period of about 1939 to 1945. So some background to this scholarship and really the historical literature that I hope to contribute to is really focused on the history of the creation of the UN but I tend to see that a lot of this is weighted towards the influence and the role of the United States to the exclusion and really the detriment of other powers principally the Soviet Union but also the United Kingdom who are really present in a very big way in terms of planning and then negotiating which would become the UN by 1944 and then 45 but just that's kind of a larger point I do think this moment if you look at the creation of the UN must be treated in kind of an approach of international history right so while the UK and the Soviet Union are essential to this story there are also other countries which we must talk about from Canada to Australia to the Netherlands to France and on and on so a future project after I get this book out hopefully in the next few years will be an international history of the creation of the UN where I hope to draw in other authors their diplomatic historians in particular to kind of shed light on the contributions of other nations as well as the contribution of individuals who contributed towards this creation of the UN. The work today is really just a portion of this so I'll be talking about what I think will make up the first and maybe the second chapter of a future book and this really concerns I can switch over oh here we go this concerns the earliest stages of British planning for the post-war world and especially the post-war political insecurity structures so this runs from about September 1939 with the outbreak of the war uh to December 1942 where this presentation will end so part one two and three and then part four I hope to close on maybe some takeaways for today okay so let's begin actually off to go over some general points first so in this period I think these are a few things worth highlighting first there's a distinct lack of long-term planning in the early years of the war the cabinet ministers as well as many junior officials were simply more preoccupied with the war at this stage second war aims and really the idea for a post-war international organization grows up out of the need to offer an alternative to German plans for a new European order third by the end of 1940 the first serious views about the post-war world had begun to develop and this was sparked by the work of John Maynard Keynes fourth British planning was shaped by two crucial considerations the United States and the Soviet Union in particular of the fact that the United States needed to be brought into the maintenance of peace on the European second the United Kingdom could not simply move towards the United States it would also need to maintain good relations with the Soviet Union and finally the earliest plans for post-war organization were conceived as a new concert of Europe the balance of power here was seen as underpinning a future international organization so I think that's kind of a crucial point that we can consider and then hopefully discuss okay so let's begin in September 1939 with the outbreak of war between Germany and the United Kingdom just three weeks into the war the head of the foreign office Alexander Keduggen received a message from one of his senior officials who had been put in charge of coordinating propaganda this official pointed out that the task of developing British propaganda against Germany immediately brought up questions of quote high policy in other words in order to construct accurate messaging about the future British policy towards the European continent the government needed to agree upon its war aims the official explained that it was not enough to simply state what they were fighting against but in order to convince the populations of Europe their safety and prosperity laid outside of the German Reich the official wrote the British government needed to articulate what it was fighting for so not just what it's fighting against but what it's fighting for but in this period there wasn't much to draw on in terms of war aims Neville Chamberlain in the weeks after the declaration of war I think this actually comes in the first weeks of October 1939 had made some vague comments about needing to restructure the international system but there wasn't much substance to this so one official wrote that it would be quote a little unreal to commit ourselves to any definition of world order when we have hardly entered upon our immediate task vague and high sounding phrases carry little conviction when neither we ourselves nor the world at large know whether we are going to be in a position to realize them but even against this backdrop of focusing on the war and waiting to state more specific war aims there was from the start a loose conception which held that the united kingdom would benefit from the restoration of an international order in this way the notion of national interest as it had been for long stretches of the 19th century was wrapped up in the ability of the united kingdom to construct wider political economic and security systems not only were such ordering systems favorable but given modern realities they were also deemed necessary as one senior official in the foreign office wrote in the modern world it is utterly futile to imagine that nations can live a life to themselves and that national sovereignty should override all other considerations now when we look to this period of British foreign policy it's important to understand that some of the intellectual or it's important to understand some of the intellectual context also which you might call the intellectual currents of the time so I won't go into too much detail but this is a very broad overview and the key thing to remember here is that British diplomats were not some isolated cabal foreign policy thinkers but were instead a part of a robust intellectual environment one in which a number of individuals and institutions were advancing their own post or revisions so you have lord robert sessel who's on the top left who was credited by many with having played the most important role on the british side in the creation of the league of nations who was submitting his own proposals and recommendations into the british government in the early days of the war in terms of recommendations about what the post-war world might look like other prominent figures within the british elite such as lord david davies wrote of his desire to see a confederation on the european continent something he called the united states of europe elsewhere domestic and foreign policy thinkers associated with the labor party men such as hu dalton and gdh coal were revamping earlier notions of progressive or what they called muscular internationalism but one of the most important groupings which shaped the debate around the future british or around future british foreign policy consisted of leading british academics who were associated with chatham house the historians arnold toinby alford zimmern and charles webster among others had long been concerned with contemporary foreign policy and they would work to put their suggestions across in 1939 they founded the world order study group which comprised a number of academics concerned with the future organization of peace for those who know the center for grand strategy at kings we have a world order study group that we run but this is very much less ambitious in the early years of the war these historians were brought closer to the policy making realm and though their assignments were mainly research based they continued to submit ambitious policy recommendations ones which focused for often contain blueprints for the future international and regional orders these documents rarely influenced official policy but they were representative of what you might call intellectual estuary in which thinkers outside of government were driving the more ambitious thinking about the future of the international system so moving on to part two by the summer of 1940 after france had fallen and church will take it over as prime minister there was an increasing urge among officials within the foreign office to take the initiative and deliver some kind of alternative proposal for a future european order the central fear was that hitler's visions of a new european economic order were one in which or one which a number of populations in europe might find attractive more over the germans and their allies in italy had since the start of the war been criticizing british statesmen as quote outworn plutocrats without ideas and only trying to keep what they last grabbed so this set off a flurry of activity within the foreign office as senior officials renewed calls for britain to quote take the offensive by developing alternative visions for europe initially there are calls by some officials to create an international economic structure one which would be led by the americans and the british and would offer a counter to hitler's own designs in july 1940 the foreign office actually proposes this to the americans that this stage the roosevelt administration turns the idea down for the time being simply because they do not want to commit to post war aims at this stage thus foreign office officials are stalled somewhat in their early planning for a post war world though it's important to note that the discussions and the debates around the future were well underway a key moment in this in the early stages at least comes towards the end of the summer 1940 when cabinet ministers create the cabinet war aims committee the idea here was to form brain trusts in the words of general yann smuts the south african prime minister which he said might develop plans to counter germane propaganda it's important to note that behind this cabinet initiative was another motive one which held that control over post war policy was being shaped conceptually by individuals who cabinet ministers did not think that they knew what they were talking about so as the minister of information duff cooper wrote quote there are two extremes between which we want to steer a middle course we don't want to have or excuse me we do not want to have a lot of professors out of touch with realities thinking brilliantly in an academic void nor do we want purely propaganda propagandists i should say in his words opportunist propagandists changing their views from day to day with the course of events ideally those thinking about post war matters on the one hand be capable of taking long views and planning for the future as well as being able to connect domestic and foreign interests so this cabinet committee meets five times in the autumn of 1940 but it is largely unproductive it's worth noting though that here we see one of Churchill's first opinions at least his prime minister about the post war world he described quote a council of europe which would be made up of five great powers of europe he defined these as prussia united kingdom france italy in spain and uh they would sit on this council of europe and be joined by new confederations that would be formed after the war one in northern europe one in middle europe and one in the Balkans he also spoke in an international court that would be used to settle disputes as well as an international air force to help enforce decisions while this cabinet committee doesn't get too far in its original aims it did have an important effect on lower level officials especially those in the foreign office who in effect were gauging their own recommendations based on the topics taken up by cabinet ministers there was as well a degree of resentment present within the foreign office ranks seeing themselves as not only the most capable but also the government department which was in theory responsible for developing foreign policy writ large and they found much of this cabinet work to be vague and devoid of more practical considerations which might form the basis of future policy so though the foreign office does not yet have a dedicated planning body at this stage officials views are coalescing coalescing excuse me around certain general points first while there was an understanding that political and economic ordering systems would need to be developed the nature of this international machinery as they called it remained the crucial question what mattered was not that countries could organize themselves according to idealistic principles and common interests these ideas as alexander cadogan argued had been quote blown to bits by the brute force of highly industrialized revisionist powers such as Germany Italy and Japan all of whom in his words had quote returned force securely to its throne in the future the united kingdom would need to cultivate and maintain a degree of military power in order to play a role first in europe and then in other regions of the world second and this is the major point is that they begin to state openly that the united states will need to be drawn into the maintenance of peace on the european continent everything cadogan wrote will be dependent on the willingness and the ability of the united states to share our burden in these months in these months though i should say a really important development takes place again this comes against the backdrop get one step ahead it comes against the backdrop of nazi leaders speaking publicly about their future plans for the european continent crucially reports were coming in from the foreign office coming into the foreign office from embassies abroad that certain neutral countries and even business leaders in europe had begun making plans to basically adapt to german financial and monetary systems and this was very much because they doubted the ability of the british to offer alternative solutions so at this stage the british government is searching for ideas and it is suggested that the famed economist john maynard canes be consulted canes who was working in the treasury at the time delivered a paper arguing that what european countries desired more so than even political independence was social security this he said must be the policy at home and on the continent the avoidance of post war starvation currency crises and the wild fluctuations of employment markets and prices would have to be the focus of british post war planners and for this they would need to secure the cooperation of the united states the preservation of economic health in every country as canes put it was the key to future peace so canes's paper received much praise from the foreign office where many officials saw his work as representative of the innovative ideas which would ensure that britain could influence the discussion of the post war order anthony eden who by december had to play had replaced lord hallifax as foreign secretary came in and was intent on fostering a more innovative strategic approach within the foreign office and he found this to be the most useful document that he had seen up until that time but eden's desire to deliver his first substantive remarks on the post war world which he hoped to do in the spring of 1941 it ran up against the views of the prime minister who doubted whether it was prudent to issue such statements at the present time church hill wrote to his foreign secretary that he was quote doubtful about the utility of attempts to plan the peace before we have won the war throughout the spring of 1941 there is an attempt to share these ideas with the americans though at this stage the roosevelt administration is once again very lukewarm about openly discussing post war clans at least with the british so now we'll fast forward a bit through the spring and to the end of summer 1941 when roosevelt and church hill meet off the coast of newfoundland and what was their first wartime meeting though a great deal of history has been written on this conference in the so called atlantic charter which was signed at its conclusion less attention has been placed on alexander cadogan as the individual responsible for the first draft of this joint declaration importantly and what i hope my work shows is that cadogan's recommendations were very much the product of what was an amorphous but somewhat substantive debate developing within the foreign office over the previous two years the key clause to focus on at least as it relates to this research is the eighth i believe it's the eighth you might have checked me on that but it deals with the future international organization this had been a british suggestion initially in cadogan's first draft and while roosevelt and his advisors sought to water down this language so as not to stoke isolationist sentiment within the united states they remained in the final production of the agreed declaration the mention of quote the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security the atlantic charter itself has been held up as one of these defining moments of the war when the broad outlines of the post-war world were drawn up by the americans and the british while it was no doubt important the british government and in particular the foreign office did not see it as all-important at least at not at least at that stage officials said it was quote woolly minded and smacked of the old cliches of the league of nations despite these reservations there was some alignment in these months as to the basic requirements of a british post-war strategy it was understood that the united states given its military and economic prowess would have to remain involved in the world most importantly in europe the clause relating to the future international organization in particular was viewed as a way to ensure american involvement in the post-war world and especially on the european continent as one official put it quote unless the americans give continued support to an international organization it will be quite impossible to prevent one or the other of the great continental powers from making after a suitable interval exactly the same attempt to dominate the continent as germany is making now but just as british officials were becoming more resigned to the fact that they needed to bring the united states into the post-war order they were also seriously concerned about future relations with the soviet union declarations in the middle of the atlantic ocean the soviet ambassador in london explained to the foreign secretary do not engender trust in moscow there was a recommendation at this stage by some foreign office officials and for those who are foreign office historians in this call this was from orn sergeant who was deputy under secretary of state he recommended to develop a vulga charter which might do for anglo anglo soviet relations what the atlantic charter had done for anglo american relations improving relations with the russians also came to be seen as a way to strengthen britain's strategic autonomy in this period as one official noted quote bringing in russia in this way might in fact serve to help us in our dealings with the americans on these matters december 1941 proved an important moment in terms of post-war planning at this stage you have the foreign secretary anthony eden and alexander cadogan meeting with stalin moscow and you also have church hill meeting with rooseville in washington dc discussions here are very much in discussions really in both capitals are very much about the ongoing war effort but there are also questions raised about the post-war world conversations with the soviets focused more on the question of post-war territorial boundaries in eastern europe but in washington church hill and rooseville agreed to the united nation's declaration which is signed on new year's day 1942 it's important to note here that the united nation's declaration did not say anything specific about a future organization at this stage the un declaration was more an alliance of states once bound by their common desire to defeat the axis powers okay on to part three although the attempts to settle british policy towards the united states and the soviet union marked an important step the foreign office was still lacking an overarching long-term policy a number of ministers and officials had begun raising concerns about this lack of planning in early 1942 the parliamentary undersecretary at the foreign office richard law he warned that strategic missteps in preparing for the peace during the first world war had led to the current conflict he said quote it was in our strategical thinking in the strategy of peace that we made our mistakes it was because our strategy was wrong that our tactics never worked out and now he said if we do not develop a grand strategy of peace we shall be wrong again and we shall have another war following on from this in june the foreign office established the economic and reconstruction department which would serve as the locus of foreign office planning for the remainder of the war the head of this department was a man named gladwin jub who would be the key planner on the british side and would even become the first acting secretary general of the united nations now it's important to understand that this department was initially concerned with post-war relief and reconstruction issues so not political and security yet it went on to become the key body of post-war planning within the british government so why was this i would say there were three reasons one was the personal initiative of gladwin jub he's for a long time he had simply desired to handle the very large questions of british foreign policy or what we might call grand strategy the new body he said should not be bogged down by short-term day-to-day work but it must continue to quote focus on long-distance schemes the next reason for the department's contribution to matters of so-called high policy was the nature of the work relief and reconstruction efforts in order to be successful would require an overarching security and political framework based on the cooperation of the great powers and here's a key difference between gladwin jub and say john manor canes who jub actually looked to as someone who was really driving these debates on post-war policy but jub felt that political structures must come before economic whereas canes thought the opposite jub used a line which said or and i quote here that freedom from fear must precede freedom from want thirdly and most importantly there was a perception amongst british officials that the foreign office needed to catch up with the planning being undertaken in the united states in june there were reports from the british embassy in washington the state department now had a dedicated team focusing on post-war issues this team had long been in existence at least since 1939 but this is the first time that it's formally relayed to the british foreign office but did britain really know what the americans were thinking at this stage there was no definitive conversation on these issues but officials in the economic and reconstruction department were able to piece it together though roosevelt had spoken of his four policemen idea this was not made official in conversations with british diplomats instead the foreign office looked to ongoing discussions about relief issues which were taking place in washington and they began to see the americans and the british who were part of these negotiations were talking about a political committee made up of the united states the united kingdom the soviet union in china in this political committee would direct the affairs of this relief body there was also one more hint which is that the united nation's declaration and the signing of that document on january 1st 1942 had been revealing in that the four principal powers us uk soviet union in china had signed the document a full day before the other united nations so again it's little hints about how the united states is thinking about the relationship between what you might call the great powers or the principal allies and the rest of the united nations so it's with the perception of american progress in british delay that the economic reconstruction department economic and reconstruction department excuse me set about developing its own grand strategy for the post war period the first paper dealing directly with this subject was produced by jeb at the beginning of august 1942 and it was titled relief machinery the political background and it sought to address the overarching political framework between the americans the british and the russians jeb left no doubt that the topic they were grappling with concerned in his words quote the reorganization of the world what is interesting to note here is that at this drafting stage this is something that jeb includes in the document is that we he says that we must avoid the simple idealisms of people like hg wells in clarence street both well-known internationalists at the time these schemes jeb wrote were utopian visions devoid of reality next and this is on this paper is that there was a delicate political balance to be struck between on the one hand pleasing the roosevelt administration and keeping them involved and on the other hand ensuring that britain was influencing the post war order the pivotal question however was whether the foreign office would choose to go along with what they perceived to be american aims or whether they would introduce their own plans in reality it was a combination of the two building upon the information gathered over the previous months jeb wrote that all signs were pointing to the roosevelt administration thinking about a post war world organization which would be based on the countries calling themselves the united nations and directed by quote a policy committee of america britain russia and china this supreme council he called it should oversee an assembly of the united nations building on his own conception of 19th century history and this is a crucial part of this moment in the planning story really is that jeb labeled it a quote concert of the world which might keep the peace for the next hundred years in the same way as the concert of europe kept the peace on the european continent at least between the battle of waterloo and the first world war and these are his words here though jeb recommended that they adopt the basic conception of the americans he also recommended that they infuse the four power conception with their own regional idea which might give the united states the united kingdom and the soviet union their own spheres of influence not only would this help to create a balance of power between the three great powers but it would also allow britain to shape the european continent to its own interests after considering the comments of his colleagues within the foreign office jeb resubmits this paper and now calls it the four power plan and this becomes the first major foreign office proposal for the post-war international order in this paper which was given to the cabinet and jeb is really trying to convince the cabinet ministers at this stage he wrote that for britain to remain an influential great power they would need to join into a larger world system and to show themselves ready to make necessary sacrifices therein he says quote we can only hope to play our part as a european or a world power if we ourselves form part of a wider organization this did not necessarily mean an organization resembling the league but it did imply building up quote the machinery of international cooperation from the existing members of the united nations we should regard the conception of the four powers working within the framework of the united nations as the present basis our foreign policy he wrote by the end of september 1942 the paper has been approved by the foreign office and it's sent to the cabinet but it's here that they face serious resistance in a great cabinet debate ensues one where alternative visions of regional and international order were recommended and tested the prime minister for one was really the greatest hindrance to foreign office planning in these months and one could argue hindrance throughout 1943 and 1944 as well at first he simply said that the government should not be wasting time on these issues they had a war to fight churchills refusal to consider the plans of the foreign office even creates a rupture with his foreign secretary anthony eden who threatens to resign if the four power plan is not considered in cabinet crucially there are other proposals from cabinet ministers one which extended into a discussion about future regional and international structures sir staffer crips then the lord privy seal he suggested the creation of a council of europe to deal with social economic and political matters in the continent importantly the council of europe would be one of five world councils the other is being a pan-american union led by the united states a council of asia led by china the british commonwealth nations led by great britain and a region led by the soviet union these will become the five world councils and on top of this would sit a supreme world council these are the views of staffer crips other counter proposals flowed in from other cabinet ministers as well erinus bevin one of the key leaders of the labor party in this period stressed the need for economic structures while others such as the secretary of state for india leo amry suggested that the uk focused on the empire and commonwealth and leave the europeans to develop what he called a european commonwealth the whole trend of world evolution he wrote was moving towards the formation of larger groupings of states which would make the old type which would make our old nation states as much out of date as the city state has been out of date for some hundreds of years so we see in this period big big ideas about where the world is heading where nation states are going where's the future even of the nation state so these are really big debates within the cabinet at this time just to close on this the cabinet decided in november to combine elements of jeb's paper with the cribs proposal and by january 1943 this becomes the united nations plan this and especially the four power plan before it served as the basis of british political and security plans for the post-war world the idea of the four powers operating within a wider grouping of the united nations remain the central organizing idea and while the foreign office inserted cribs ideas related to regional councils i would argue that this was done really out of expediency and out of a desire to ensure that the more detailed planning and negotiation which would follow would remain in the hands of the foreign office so the story ends there for now in this final slide is just a section on potential takeaways really and i realize that i'm well past my time but just to go over a few the first is the spur to international order or at least to planning for international order where do these ideas come from i think they come from many different sources but one key one that people often overlook is at least in the first stage it comes through an opposition to the ideas of other powers right so we can leave that there i can talk a bit more about that so second is how do we think about the process of grand strategy i kind of place importance on officials really seizing the pen if we can call it that so jeb in august 1942 actually taking up the activity of writing a document like the four power plan or even the paper on relief machinery before it really kick started the debate so the idea of getting these things down on paper and beginning to shape a narrative you cannot be overlooked second is kind of the politics of strategy making and so that's where we look at the cabinet debate i didn't get too much into the politics in terms of how foreign office officials were trying to influence cabinet ministers but strategy making is very much dependent on the actual uh internecine politics i would say both within the foreign office but also within the cabinet third the relationship between internationalism and power politics these things are not mutually exclusive i think one of the great insights of british planning in these years but especially 1943 to 1945 is that they're really working to make sure that power politics what we might call balance of power in particular is underpinning a larger international order and especially an international organization finally the interaction between academics and diplomats and policy makers in this period i find absolutely fascinating i haven't covered charles webster he was professor of international history at lse from 1932 to the late 1950s but he is brought into the planning for the un in 1943 and along with gladwin jeb he becomes the key planners on the british side but at the same time although you have charles webster very close to this planning operation you also have academics like arnold toinby and alford zimmer among many others who people like jeb or even kandogan look at and say you don't really know what you're talking about you write wonderful books but when it comes to foreign policy we're gonna keep our distance uh so i leave it there and i would love to hear your thoughts or any questions and i'll try to to answer them as best i can that's great andrew thank you so much for a very rich uh in detailed presentation we've got um a chat um a question in the chat box but i know i'm conscious matt's needs to skedaddle soon so i'm going to um have uh give the floorboard to matt's quickly and then um and then we'll go back to thomas stuffy's um comment and question matt's thank you very much and thank you very much andrew for a um terrific presentation really really interesting and i suppose i should congratulate you first on finishing your your dissertation as well and i look forward to reading reading this is absolutely fascinating i had two two quick questions and i think you sort of touched on them but i'm i'm intrigued by them and suppose the first one reflects a little bit the fact that we've just had an announcement yesterday wasn't it about a new integrator foreign and defense policy um and the question is uh you emphasize rightly of course the balance of power thinking that lies at the heart of of british planning um but then you talk a great deal of very interesting about the influence of academics and some of them being accused of being hopeless and dreamy professors and ideas going back and forth my question is whether there was in these debates there is much evidence um and perhaps a discussion of what the possible implications are of the fact that britain's relative power position will have changed uh pretty dramatically as a result of the second world war itself uh i mean you know the famous quip which is much later that britain hasn't found a new role for itself i think it's 1960 that acheson does that thing but i'm just intrigued whether some of the dreamy professors you're talking about are alluding to the fact that you know the world has changed in in perhaps fundamental ways i mean the outcome in terms of the the four power arrangements and the security council of course doesn't suggest that it's taken on board but i'd be curious to see whether there is any evidence in these debates and the very interesting discussions you mentioned between the academic community and between officials and the other question i think you touched on an indirectly perhaps when you talked about internationalism and power politics uh and i know it's not your immediate remit in this particular talk but i wonder whether there was also again in the evidence of background discussion a a discussion about the the balance within the charter um and the whole setup between what you might call the order related provisions of the chart and the justice related provisions obviously the order related provisions were concerned about avoiding another catastrophe like the second world war and a conflict between states but of course the second world war was also about avoiding a genocide and and and war crimes and crimes against humanity that of course is receives a much lighter touch doesn't it in the charter than the order related provision but i wonder whether that discussion is is is detectable in in what you've seen um you know what what is the relative balance between the two we know that our wording is of certain you know things in the charter that are intriguing and fascinating like the self-determination of peoples for example and putting human rights in the preamble rather than elsewhere but i'd be curious about your your sense of the extent to which there was a discussion also about the sort of the normative and if you like the the the justice related provisions of the charter thanks again yeah thank you so much i know uh you're busy today but thanks so much for joining it's great to hear your thoughts on this so i'll try to answer these as as best i can um let me take the first one or excuse me the second one first i like how you distinguish between order and justice or normative and normative and maybe well objective if you want to call it that i don't think that's the right word i understand what you're getting at but i do think that that's an interesting way to think about this i think from 1939 to 1944 and through the dumbart notes negotiations which is really when the united states britain and the soviet union decide on the structure and functioning of what becomes the united nations throughout that period it's all about order in that sense and when it comes to normative ideas the big one that they're talking about is ensuring that this doesn't become a four-power dictatorship and so that's really the influence of charles webster who from his earliest contributions in 1943 begins to look at jeb's plans and says i understand that we need to have what basically amounts to a great power alliance who is going to be in charge of maintaining peace on the european continent and also throughout the international system at least in theory but we must make this a more inclusive system and so he starts talking about the way that lord castle ray brought smaller powers into the concert of europe at the time and how the alignment between british interests and more universal interest if we can call it that uh was a key tradition in british foreign policy so therefore we need to make this a more inclusive international organization and so that's the extent almost of the normative aspect so small powers and then i would also add economic structures was a big thing in terms of how um the british start to see this international organization as outside of just pure order but then you come to the san francisco conference and really the period between dumbard nooks in san francisco so that's i think about 10 months um san francisco april 1945 there you have developments which are really based on what's going on in europe and what ally troops are finding as they move across germany and into poland right in the extent of what we now know was was the holocaust right and so you have some interesting proposals that start to come up and there are a lot of other powers like smaller powers who were at the san francisco conference who were saying we need to really think about what we might call humanitarian intervention today um and so there's a debate at the san francisco and among the british delegation you have charles webster and alexander cadogan even voicing ideas which today would be called humanitarian intervention and they run up against what was known as domestic jurisdiction at that time so there's this debate between really sovereignty and intervention in order to prevent these war crimes which we're now realizing the extent of them really so this comes very very late um and then you even see uh un declaration of human rights which comes a bit later and this is this is stuff that's talked about in the spring of 1945 and the lead up to the san francisco conference but once again the emphasis remains if i had to get a percentage maybe 85 percent on the idea of order so yeah it's very very much this idea of the maintenance of peace and security um this is something i need to add into my book project though because i don't think i mentioned this at the start but the key argument in the book and the phd even was that the foreign office well first that britain played a key role and then within britain it was the foreign office that was decisive and then within the foreign office it was alexander cadogan cladwin jeb and trawls webster but there's also one other official who i think i need to start highlighting a bit more and his name was william malkin and he was the legal advisor at the foreign office who was involved with this stuff throughout and so he was the one that was really focused on um the debate between domestic jurisdiction and intervention um yeah so without going into too much more on that um i hope that that's enough on the first question it's really interesting i mean i think jeb is is he brings trawls webster in because he considers webster to be a great power man and he writes that in his memoirs he thinks out of all these academics trawls webster knows what's going on but in reality trawls webster and this is something i'm working on for another piece he's a radical internationalist and he believes that you know we're moving towards a world state and a world state as in there's one sovereign authority which is controlling kind of a federalized world system i mean it was really kind of out there yet he has so much expertise on 19th century um concert of europe and especially the armistice negotiations in 1814 and 1815 as well as expertise in the league of nations that jeb brings him in but he doesn't really know i don't think webster's um true designs if you will and i think webster's solid u n is kind of a stepping stone to these larger internationalist structures so i think a lot of academics really did know what they were talking about and they were really big thinkers but there was this idea that amongst foreign office officials that they were busy bodies and actually use that word which is an old word used by eric crow who's a foreign office official around the first world war and so they look to academics and say these guys and unfortunately they're all white men at the time but these guys do tend to know what they're talking about if you can control their expertise so we need to be able to tell them to not get too idealistic if you will but they're pretty good but i i think really for house history unfolding and so i think they're really setting almost the terms of the debate in a very subtle way in the foreign office would never admit that so i hope that answers your thank you very much really interesting thank you well it's great to see that you know the pie in the sky kind of um great thinker academic kind of trove um you know has a history practitioners um yeah because we're still continuing those issues of how we talk to practitioners and how they engage with academics so that's a long history with that so andrew i think what we're going to do is i'm going to read thomas's question to you you can hear me okay i think there might have just been a bit of a tech glitch but you can hear me yeah yeah okay and then um i'll hand the floor over to adrian to ask adrian's question a bulk them and then you can respond to both if that's okay with you that sounds great yeah okay so so thomas first comments um and this came earlier uh in your discussion that the focus on keeping the united states involved in the in the united nations and probably a reason for agreeing to put the headquarters in new york city tracks with michael howards comments on versailles treaty that versailles wasn't necessarily unjust but rather it was unbalanced if the united states dropped out of the treaty and its subsequent arrangements so that was a common on when you were talking about um the strategy for particularly bringing the united states on board but his question to you is what does the creation of the united nations suggest to us about uh un reform if the un security council is not restructured in the next 20 years the five permanent members will reflect the end of the war or end of a war that ended a century before it's a bit like saying the victors of waterloo in 1815 should still be running the international security um so yeah so i'll get you to reflect upon that important question um and adrian did you want to ask your question live uh yes thank you um just to say who i am i'm adrian johnson in the uh fcdo research analysts actually was once upon a time was the foreign office research department founded by towingby one of the characters in your story adria brilliant stuff i'm really looking forward to the book i just want to ask a very quick question building slightly on what matt's asked which was you know this this tension between order and justice in the in the design of the system um the obvious premise to my question is that the uk is now a middle power right and so its position now is much more analogous to what the dominions were during the war and at the conference and um as i'm sure you'll get to sort of in the book there there was some quite heated debates uh at san francisco and certain aspects of the charter but i want to ask how did the how did the views of the dominions influence the uk's views did they at all um how responsive was the foreign office uh to to that sort of set of middle powers with which it had quite close links and how did the uk try to square off a sort of baseline degree of legitimacy of the system that would keep everyone involved while at the same time acknowledging that a wanted a special place for itself at the table which i think it believed was justified but obviously recognizing that many other states would not like this um i'll leave that there thank you thank you both for your questions um adrian i'm jotting down your question there's so much to say on this and i just want to make sure i'm going to get the most important parts um and also we have three minutes i'm going to try to make this quick dominion powers were hugely influential but the entire time the brits are trying to check them um canada for instance it has a very interesting strategic dimension here which and obviously all the dominions now have their own foreign policy i think from might get this wrong the 1920s 1930s they're beginning to control their own um foreign policy right so the brits are saying yes we're part of uh you're part of the commonwealth and the foreign office tends to think and their assumption is that we still can lead and the dominions will follow and they have a pretty rude awakening when it comes to canada who is hinting that well you know we can kind of align closer with the united states as well and move a bit away from london and so the foreign office is getting to be very concerned about that australia at the san francisco conference and new zealand are absolute thorns in the side of the british delegation and they're um at one point lord howlfax charles webster and many others who were part of the british delegation are looking at um evitt who is the australian i'm going to get it wrong now i think foreign minister uh who is who you're saying that you're jeopardizing this entire international organization right if you keep pressing us in v uh if you keep pressing us and i don't want to say veto because australians were basically pushing back on the veto powers of the great powers but eventually it's it's accepted so i think the dominion powers very difficult to control for the foreign office and the assumption was at the beginning of the war that they would be able to control them and at least that they would kind of follow in tow and they it was kind of a rude awakening for the brits in that sense there's also interesting angles to this which is in a month before the san francisco conference there's a huge dominion conference or conference of dominion prime ministers within london this takes place in may 1945 excuse me actually this is they have one in may 1945 but there's one in 1944 in may 1944 which is an essential moment because there you have the foreign office who has ever more detailed plans that they want to start sharing with the americans and russians but you also have churchill who continues to put his own plans over those of the foreign office and the thing that settles this debate between churchill and the foreign office is that the dominion prime ministers basically side with gladwin jeb and charles webster and so charles webster's diary entries in may 1944 about this are hilarious because he's like the dominion prime ministers have basically helped us win over this prime minister who continues to frustrate our efforts to create this amazing international system so that's just a little caveat but lots more to say on that but i hope that has gone some way towards answering your question um tom is very quickly it's a really really important question and it's one that i actually tried to address in an article recently i hope i've i've done it and articulated it okay i was felt like i was going out on a limb but what the point that i was trying to make is um i think we can learn a lot from what you might call this ordering moment in 1944 to 45 and especially the intentions of the british planners right so this the relationship between notions and conceptions of internationalism but also the realities and really conceptions of power politics and how they are not mutually exclusive the other big thing is that um at the san francisco conference the british delegation puts up a proposal that the un charter should be reviewed after 10 to 15 years so they did not create this un system and think that it would last 100 years there was an assumption held by jeb and charles webster in particular that you needed to build these structures on what they call the interplay of living forces right so it could not be this structure that would last for eternity you would constantly have to adapt this was eventually voted down but the idea was is that the entire system the entire international organization would need to be malleable in order to keep up with international politics in the state of international politics um and i had one more thing to say on that but i forgot and now riverton so i might leave it there fascinating talk and i think you know for me not being a historian um more in contemporary politics i can just see how you know the these tensions as as i'm sure you as a historian are not surprised play out in contemporary right continue to play out the different power of politics and and relationships between these different stakeholders um thank you so much andrew for sharing your research with us and you have to let us know when the book is out and we can have a proper book launch okay all right i really appreciate that i hope i can just finish the thing it's going to take me forever um but amanda thank you so much for inviting me and again for this incredible initiative um and i look forward to attending in the future yeah absolutely and just to signpost to all the audience members too is that if you want to follow andrew's work or uh and learn more about him um international affairs the journal is doing online um release of blog posts from our presenters based on their presentation but a little bit more about themselves and their research uh so the next andrew will be in the next um release installment that i believe is going to be out at the end of april so watch the space for that um and uh thank you so much for coming along and hopefully i'll see you at another uh lunchtime seminar have a great afternoon everyone thanks for coming thank you