No enchanted palace.

AuthorBrown, John H.
PositionBook review

No Enchanted Palace

Review by John H. Brown, Ph.D.

Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-4008-3166-1, 236 pp, $24.95

Hate it or love it, the United Nations is widely associated with idealism in international relations, not state-centered Hobbesian realpolitik. For the UN's critics, who see the world as a nasty and corrupt place, this idealism seems naive and hypocritical; for the UN's supporters, who as a rule hold a more optimistic view of mankind, its idealism is a beacon of hope.

In the book under review, based on a series of lectures at major US universities, Mark Mazower, the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History and World Order at Columbia University (and author of the magisterial Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe), provides his scholarly insights about the founding principles of the United Nations. He argues, provocatively, that the UN was a "warmed up" League of Nations, created, "at least at the outset," by "the idea of imperial internationalism," rather than its being, as commonly believed, an "American affair, the product of public debate and private discussion in which other countries played little part."

As revealed by the book's first chapter, the segregationist South African politician Jan Smuts, a firm believer in the British Empire, played a crucial role in the ideological origins of the UN. Mazower underscores the irony that Smuts--"a man whose segregationist policies back home paved the way for the apartheid state"--was a moving force behind the world organization's "commitment to universal rights." (In a politically incorrect way, I couldn't help but think of parallels between Smuts and Senator J. William Fulbright, the Rhodes scholar and segregationist Arkansas senator, who almost single-handedly was the creator of the "internationalist" educational program one year after the UN was established).

The UN would protect the status quo, or so some of its advocates thought but, in a departure from the policies of the League of Nations after WWI, "this time around, the commitment of national self-determination and the turn away from law were more extensive." (The origins of such a complex development are explored in detail in Chapter 2...

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