User:John Z/drafts/Leo Pasvolsky

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Contents 1 sec 2 add 3 Criticism 4 Works 5 References 6 Notes 7 Further Reading 8 External Links 9 stuff 10 stuff2 11 stuff3 12 NYT obit 12.1 Helped Break Deadlock 12.2 Many Books Published

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Leo Pasvolsky (1893-1953) was a journalist, economist, state department official and personal assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He was one of the United States government's main planners for the post World War II world, and most notably, he was the "probably the foremost author of the UN Charter."^[1]The title of his New York Times obituary states "Wrote Charter of World Organization." A short, rotund, mustachioed pipe smoker with a very large and round head, he joked he might find it easier to roll than to walk. An aide compared him to the third little pig in the Three Little Pigs, Hull called him "Friar Tuck." A hardworking "one-man think tank" for Hull, he preferred to stay invisible, in the background.^[2] In the words of Richard Holbrooke, he " was one of those figures peculiar to Washington -- a tenacious bureaucrat who, fixed on a single goal, left behind a huge legacy while virtually disappearing from history."^[3]

Pasvolsky was born in Pavlograd in the Russian Empire in 1893. His parents were anti-czarists and the family fled to the United States in 1905. After graduating from the City College of New York in 1916 he studied political science at Columbia University and also attended the University of Geneva. He then edited two periodicals, the monthly The Russian Review and Amerikansky Viestnik. Engaged in the tempestuous political climate of the emigres in New York, he debated Leon Trotsky during his visit to New York in 1916. He was at first optimistic about the Russian Revolution, but became embittered and anti-communist after Lenin's October Revolution.

In 1919 he covered the Paris Peace Conference for the New York Tribune, the Brooklyn Eagle and other newspapers, and in 1921 he covered the Washington Arms Conference for the Baltimore Sun. During this period he became a Wilsonian internationalist and softened his stance toward the Soviet Union, arguing for its recognition by the US and its admittance into the League of Nations.

In 1922 he became an economist on the staff of the Brookings Institution, from which he received a Ph. D. in 1936, and which was his institutional base until his death in 1953. Early in the first Roosevelt administration, he was hired by Cordell Hull as his personal assistant but returned to Brookings after two years. Later he worked in the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce of the Department of Commerce (1934-35) and in the Division of Trade Agreements 1935-36 and later in various capacities in the State Department from 1935 to 1946.^[4] During the 30s and 40s, frequently with Harold G. Moulton,. his closest ally and collaborator since the 1920's at Brookings, he envisioned a stable, open world economy based on international political cooperation involving a successor to the League of Nations, wider than an alliance of democracies, and with international police powers. Earlier Brookings studies of the 20s and 30s focused on the importance of worldwide demand to the American economy, but by 1941 Paslovsky and Moulton underscored the ever growing dependence of the American economy on foreign raw materials binding the US more tightly to the world economy. "Even before America entered the war, Pasvolsky was thinking about the postwar world. ^[5] He joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 1938. ^[6][4]Along with Norman Davis, Pasvolsky, nicknamed "Pazzy" by some council members, became the main liaison between the Council and the State Department, and regularly attended the Council's Economic and Financial Group meetings in New York.^[7]

As Hull's assistant, he was on the same level as the six assistant secretaries of state.^[8]

In September 1939, Hull assigned Pasvolsky to planning for the postwar peace, and at Pasvolsky's suggestion, set up theAdvisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations. After this became moribund, Hull appointed Pasvolsky the first director of the State Department's new Division of Special Research in February, 1941. When this was split in January 1943 into a Division of Political Studies and a Division of Economic Studies, Pasvolsky continued to supervise them. He was executive officer of the secretive Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, which superseded the Division, returning to the broadly based Advisory Committee concept, The work of this committee led to the drafting of an outline for a "preliminary UN" by Undersecretary Sumner Welles, based on the design of the League of Nations. Pasvolsky and Hull eventually opposed Welles' draft as being too hastily written. The major split was over whether the organization would have a "regional" nature, perhaps with local councils, in which each great power would have most of the responsiblity for its region, or would have more centralized structure. Welles, as well as Winston Churchill (and later, Nelson Rockefeller) favored "regionalism," while Pasvolsky and Hull favored a unitary global body. Roosevelt wavered between the two sides. ^[9]

Throughout 1942, Welles took the lead on planning for the UN and in January 1943 discussed a new and full draft charter with Roosevelt. It incorporated Roosevelt's four power "global policemen" but gave them less than absolute veto powers on an Executive Council with "regional" members too. Welles continued to work on the draft, but after a period of political infighting with Hull, he was forced to resign in August 1943. Subsequently Hull took charge of UN planning, and appointed Pasvolsky to put together a draft charter, which he produced in August. It retained the Security Council, General Assembly and Secretariat, which Welles and Pasvolsky had agreed on, but downplayed regionalism. With the absence of Welles or any other figure with comparable influence, interest and expertise Pasvolsky's ideas and phrasing dominated the drafting henceforward. Before Hull departed for the Moscow Conference (1943), Pasvolsky advised him that economic reconstruction, especially in the USSR, should be a prioritized, while Bowman insisted on territorial agreements restricting Soviet expansion.^[10] By February 3, 1944, Roosevelt had approved Pasvolsky's latest draft. It incorporated two major departures. Unlike the League of Nations, it entrusted security matters exclusively to the Security Council. However, it widened the Security Council into an 11 member entity, reducing the dominance of the four big powers that Roosevelt had long envisioned.

Another important innovation at Dumbarton Oaks was the Economic and Social Council. Pasvolsky and Stettinius managed to persuade Roosevelt to drop his idea of adding Brazil as a sixth member of the Security Council. Pasvolsky managed to persuade Hull and eventually the Russians to limit the veto to substantive matters only - not allowing it on procedural ones including discussions.

Thomas Connally said in his memoirs "Certainly he had more to do with writing the framework of the charter than anyone else." ^[11]

In 1943 Pasvolsky was placed in charge of International Organization and Security Affairs in the State Department with responsibility for drafting the United Nations Charter; he was present at Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks. He became chairman of the Coordination Committee at the San Francisco United Nations Conference on International Organization, where the charter was negotiated and signed. Secretary Hull depended heavily on Pasvolsky to explain the plans and proposals for the UN to President Roosevelt. It is striking how close a resemblance Pasvolsky's statement of objectives for the new international organization bears to the positions he had taken with Moulton throughout the previous decade.^[12]

In 1946–53 he was director of international studies at the Brookings Institution, and a the time of his death, he was working on a study of the origin and history of the United Nations. He died of a heart attack on May 5, 1953 in Washington, DC, survived by his wife Christine McCormick Pasvolsky, two sisters and two brothers.^[13][14]His incomplete manuscript on the history of the UN was the basis of his assistant Ruth Russell's 1961 History of the United Nations Charter, the standard work on the subject.^[15]

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++++

With the passage of time, the main task of the FRPS (Foreign research and Press Service, directed by Arnold J. Toynbee, had become department of FO in 1943) was increasingly at work on plans for reconstruction and politico-economic arrangements in the postwar world. It collaborated closely with the Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy. Toynbee and Pasvolsky "met on many occasions to discuss in detail ideas about the shape of a world order under Anglo-Saxon leadership.^[16]

++++ In his writings in the 20s, he argued that the Soviet Union's 1918-1921 war communism was an ideologically based attempt to realize Marx's vision of socialism or communism, rather than a short-term wartime expedient with no lasting significance.^[17], really from Peter J. Boettke, "The Soviet Experiment with Pure Communism," Critical Review: A Journal of Books and Ideas, Vol. 2 No. 4 (Fall 1988), pp. 149-182.

From mid-1918 until 1921, when Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, the Bolshevik regime strove to subject the already weakened Russian economy to a rigidly centralized system of planning and management that later came to be known as "war communism." (1) The experiment is generally acknowledged to have been a fiasco. But what was "war communism"? Why was it established and kept going for close on three years?

There are two opposed schools of thought on this question. Many economic historians -- Boettke focuses on Maurice Dobb, E. H. Carr, and Stephen Cohen -- have interpreted war communism as a short-term expedient imposed on the Bolsheviks by the emergency demands of civil war and foreign intervention. According to this version, the system was never intended to last into normal peacetime conditions and had no special ideological significance. While this has since become "the standard account," several well-informed economists writing in the 1920s, such as Boris Brutzkus and Leo Pasvolsky, viewed war communism in a much more ideological light -- as an attempt to realize Marx' anti-market socialist or communist utopia.

+++++ Hoopes & Brinkley 114-115 say LP is "generally credited with two proposals that modulated at least the appearance of naked Big Four dominance. One was to merge the 4p (which under FDR's conception were to form a separate entity) with the larger (ultimately 11-nation) Security Council. The other was to assign exclusive jurisdiction for security matters to that council, while assigning the initiative nfor all non-security matters to the General Assembly, in which all UN members would have a vote. The League Covenant had generated confusion by giving jurisdiction in security matters to both the League Council and the League Assembly."

137, at Dumbarton, Stettinius headed delegation, exerted principal influence thru steering committe LP, Green Hackworth, and James Dunn, director of the office of European affairs

Pasv's influence, memo on trade liberalization p65-66 ^[18]

Pasvolsky's book on Bulgaria and others from this period are still regarded as useful surveys by specialists.^[19]

Pasvolsky, reflecting the think of the State Department, the British, led by Lord Keynes and even the Soviets, envisioned the "eventual integration of Germany into the world economy." This lenience towards Germany in a 1944 State department memorandum by Pasvolsky inspired Treasury secretary Morgenthau's oppposed Morgenthau plan, but while the Morgenthau plan won tentative approval, the more lenient policies were eventually carried out. ^[20] Similarly, Pasvolsky, worrying about the strain on occupation forces, similarly favored not insisting on the removal of the Japanese emperor, opposing Dean Acheson and Archibald MacLeish ^[21]

++++++++ LP ideas on place of UN:

"[U]niversal membership was based on the principle that the organization was an association of nations with common ideals and common standards of behavior. They must, he said, be agreed to undertake certain actions as obligations. He stated that States by accepting certain common principles would be thereby eligible to membership in the organization and that therefore membership had not been made to rest on the fact that a nation exists, but rather that a nation lived by certain principles. He stressed that it was clear that if peace and security were to be maintained, all nations must act in accordance with these principles. He said that when, however, a nation did not wish to accept these obligations once it had entered the organization, when it habitually violated obligations, it was no longer a part of the community of nations, but it was not thereby absolved from its obligations. He mentioned that all nations had certain obligations, whether they were members of the organization or not."

[1]

[edit] Criticism

Pasvolsky had his share of enemies at the State Department. Isaiah Bowman, one of the leading advisers of the State Department, took an instant dislike to Pasvolsky. Bowman, Welles and Pasvolsky engaged in a power struggle over the direction of the Advisory Committee in late 1942.^[22] Bowman's differences with Pasvolsky erupted at San Francisco, where he wrote that he was "dangerous to American interests" and that it was "a mistake to put one man with his background into a key position." Pasvolsky resented Bowman equally, and wrote him out of subsequent histories of the UN's founding.^[23]

Some considered Pasvolsky's Brookings ideas for the world's economic problems simple-minded. Dean Acheson referred disparagingly to the "Hull-Pasvolsky establishment" and wrote that "Leo Pasvolsky was Mr. Hull's principal speech writer. Or one might say, he wrote Mr. Hull's principal speech: for whatever the occasion or title, the speech was apt to turn into a dissertation on the benefits of unhampered international trade and the true road to it through agreements reducing tarriffs." ^[24] Acheson belittled Pasvolsky's postwar planning:

The whole effort, except for two results, seems to have been a singularly sterile one, uninspired by gifts either of insight or prophecy. One of these results was the foundation work for the United Nations Charter, the other, which laid an even broader foundation, the education of Senator Arthur Vandenberg to understand that beyond the borders of the United States existed a "vast external realm" which could and would affect profoundly our interests and our destiny.^[25]

In a 1967 letter, Acheson criticized American moralism in international affairs, which he saw as culminating in "that little rat Leo Pasvolsky's United Nations." ^[26]

[edit] Works

• Pasvolsky, Leo (1921). The Economics of Communism: With Special Reference to Russia's Experiment (pdf), New York: Macmillan. 

• Pasvolsky, Leo (1922). Russia in the Far East (pdf), New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0830500871. 

• Moulton, Harold G.;Pasvolsky, Leo (1924). Russian Debts and Russian Reconstruction: A Study of the Relation of Russia's Foreign Debts to Her Economic Recovery. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution , McGraw-Hill. 

• Moulton, Harold G.;Pasvolsky, Leo (1926). World War Debt Settlements. New York: The Macmillan Company. 

• Pasvolsky, Leo (1928). Economic Nationalism of the Danubian States. New York: Macmillan. 

• Pasvolsky, Leo (1930). Bulgaria's Economic Position: With Special Reference to the Reparation Problem and the Work of the League of Nations. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. 

• Moulton, Harold G.;Pasvolsky, Leo (1932). War Debts and World Prosperity. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. 

• Pasvolsky, Leo (1933). Current Monetary Issues. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. 

article in The Red Cross Magazine 1916

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further Reading

• Brinkley, Douglas; Hoopes, Townsend (1997). FDR and the Creation of the United Nations. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-06930-8. 
• Hilderbrand, Robert C. (1990). Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-1894-1. 
• Hull, Cordell. (1948). Memoirs of Cordell Hull. Vols 1 and 2. New York: Macmillan. 
• O'Sullivan, Christopher D. (2007). Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937-1943. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231142587. 
• Russell, Ruth B. (1958). A History of the United Nations Charter: The Role of the United States, 1940-1945. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. 
• Wala, Michael (1994). The Council on Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War. Providence, R.I.: Berghann Books. ISBN 157181003X. 

• Notter, Harley (1993). Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 1939-1945. Reprint Services Company. ISBN 0781249201. 

[edit] External Links

• http://www.biography.com/search/article.do?id=9434459
• http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/Cambridge/entries/049/Leo-Pasvolsky.html
• http://wsi.matriots.com/pasvolsky.html
• http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Pasvolsky,+Leo

ategory:Bretton Woods conference delegates

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"SCHLESINGER: Leo Pasvolsky was a colorless bureaucrat in the State Department who nobody had ever heard of until this book was written, and yet he was probably the foremost author of the U.N. charter.

JSTOR: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 54, No. 1, (1960 ), pp. 280-293.International Law, Organization and Politics bk review

He was the one given an assignment by Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, who was then secretary of state, in 1939, and he spent six years actually drafting that charter, the charter which we now basically have today before us in the United Nations." [2]

Pasvolsky, Leo The Economics of Communism: With Special Reference to Russia's Experiment Macmillan , 1921 http://www.questia.com/read/676576

http://www.newleftreview.org/A2478 review of Act of Creation

An obscure but determined State Department official named Leo Pasvolsky had been working in secret on a postwar world organization since the end of 1939, under the direct guidance of Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Pasvolsky, a Russian-born journalist and economist who had covered the failure of the League of Nations first-hand, was one of those figures peculiar to Washington -- a tenacious bureaucrat who, fixed on a single goal, left behind a huge legacy while virtually disappearing from history.

By 1944 most key elements of the new organization were in place in Pasvolsky's draft, especially an idea that evolved into the United Nations Security Council -- a small group of nations that would be empowered to authorize the use of force, in the words of Article 39 of the Charter, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04E4DE123AF93BA1575AC0A9659C8B63 review of act of creation NYT By RICHARD HOLBROOKE Published: September 28, 2003

Died. Leo Pasvolsky, 59, Russian-born architect of the United Nations charter and economics expert at Brookings Institution; after a heart attack; in Washington, D.C. A late '30s protege of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Economist Pasvolsky served as Hull's principal behind-the-scenes strategist at the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences, broke a Big Five deadlock at San Francisco by "reinterpreting" the veto question and rewriting the U.N. charter.

Monday, May. 18, 1953

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,818511,00.html?promoid=googlep

lots more at google, amazon

• Rutherford, Malcolm (1998). The Economic Mind in America: Essays in the History of American Economics. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-13355-6. 

Chapter 7: Harold Moulton and Leo Paslovsky of the Brookings Institution as champions of a new world order Craufurd D. Goodwin

section : "The Missionary Committment of Leo Pasvolsky"

• Goodwin, Craufurd D.: Harold Moulton and Leo Paslovsky of the Brookings Institution as champions of a new world order (1998). in Rutherford, Malcolm: The Economic Mind in America: Essays in the History of American Economics. New York: Routledge, 89-95. ISBN 0415133556. 

p.89

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=RA2-PA89&lpg=RA2-PA89&dq=leo+pasvolsky&source=web&ots=4_v4goo3ZM&sig=5_ryS39GPfocdwFG1JEiL1EUurY&hl=en

p.90 http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=PA90&vq=pasvolsky&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&source=gbs_search_s&cad=4&sig=V8rd2PSUtx1UzGQtIY9vKZwA0JE

p 91

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=PA91&vq=pasvolsky&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&source=gbs_search_s&cad=4&sig=NuHE0T3fb0wB0Cd09TGEZPS7REM

p. 92

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=RA2-PA92&lpg=RA2-PA89&ots=4_v4goo3ZM&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&sig=F2Jv9u-ELdGp94noRzU2MbQ5cCM

p 93

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=PA93&vq=pasvolsky&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&source=gbs_search_s&cad=4&sig=jQBO7UUzz0rqH233ARgBqOOoVq0

p 94 (acheson's critique)

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=PA94&vq=pasvolsky&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&source=gbs_search_s&cad=4&sig=l-zatRik3r9L1EYF8eLsharSZak

p 95

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=PA95&vq=pasvolsky&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&source=gbs_search_s&cad=4&sig=eJIj4jV-Fjro2CfNNpN9NlMKUrs

NYT Obit May 7, 1953, Thursday

DR. LEO PASVOLSKY OF U. N. FAME; Economist, Ex-Aide at State Department Wrote Charter of World Organization

Page 31, 542 words

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40714F73C5B157A93C5A9178ED85F478585F9&scp=1&sq=pasvolsky&st=p

^[1]

http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2005/September/20050906111550dmslahrellek0.4635736.html

book on isaiah bowman, critical of lp http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9390/9390.ch14.php

time mag, crashes

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,801644,00.html

[edit] stuff2

10 The UN's origins, long ignored by historians as unimportant, have become the focus of more geographically prescient analyses appearing recently. See Thomas M. Campbell, Masquerade Peace: American UN Policy, 1944-45 (Talahassee: Florida State University Press, 1973); Robert C. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbartion Oaks (Houndmills, England: Macmillan, 1995). See also Gardner, Spheres of Influence.

• The Roosevelt administration and the United Nations: re-creation. Retrieved on 2008-03-27.

• Ian Hurd. [http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Intellectual_Life/Enigma_of_Article_2.pdf The Enigma of Article 2(4):

Interests, Norms, and the Ban on War]. Retrieved on 2008-03-27.

377 Pasvolsky worked for the Brookings Institution from 1923 to 1935 and received a Ph.D. in international economics there in 1936. He started as a special assistant to Hull in 1936 and became a council member in 1938 (Domhoff 1990:119-20). He headed the original State Department Division of Special research in 1941, which “was organized along the same structural lines as the Council groups, and the latter’s research secretaries were integrated into the work of the Division of Special Research” (Wala 1994:34). 378 AQI Kraft 1958:67. The full quote is, “Whenever we needed a man we thumbed through the roll of Council members and put through a call to New York.” 379 9 November 1943, quoted in Wala 1994:37 p 126

A small group of CFR members convened in January 1943 by Hull drafted the original blueprint for the United Nations. Dubbed the Informal Agenda Group, Leo Pasvolsky, Isaiah Bowman, Sumner Welles, Norman Davis and Myron Taylor submitted the plan to FDR on June 15, 1944, after consulting with CFR-affiliated attorneys on its constitutionality. The President publicly announced his approval that same day. WPS members filled the U.S. delegation to both the preparatory conference at Dumbarton Oaks and the 1945 UN founding conference in San Francisco, including the Secretary-General of the conference and secret Soviet agent Alger Hiss.441

438 CFR 1946: 6-7 439 Eichelberger 1977: 202 440 Divine 1967 441 Shoup and Minter 1977:169-71

p. 146

Domhoff, G. William (1990) The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in America (New York: Aldine de Gruyter).

Shoup, Lawrence and Minter, William (1977) Imperial Brain Trust (New York: Monthly Review).

Wala, Michael (ed.) (1993) The Marshall Plan, by Allen W. Dulles (Oxford/Providence)

Wala, Michael (1994) The Council on Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Providence, R.I.: Berghann Books). 157181003X

Marshall, Jonathan. To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4489n8wm/

http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08192005-162045/unrestricted/FinalTevelowETD.pdf ^[2]

[edit] stuff3

After serving close to ten years in the State Department, Leo Pasvolsky returned to the Brookings Institution in 1946, along with six other members of the State Department. With the financial backing of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Mellon Trust, Pasvolsky initiated an International Studies Group, which developed the basis for the Marshall Plan, to aid the European war recovery efforts.

from THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION. Retrieved on 2008-04-24., nutty?

Founding of the United Nations: "A Profound Cause of Thanksgiving". Retrieved on 2008-04-24.

---> "Indeed, if we had to pick the single most influential individual with reference to UN planning, it would have to be Pasvolsky."

"Based on the documents pertaining to the last phase in the planning process, it is possible to find out argue that nobody besides Leo Pasvolsky had the readiness to answer the main questions about the nature and key character characteristics of new world organizational entity. Not even the so-called “father of the United Nations”, the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Senator, and long-term Secretary of State Cordell Hull was ready to answer those complicated questions."

"Due to the differences in their respective roles, the planning rhetoric of Pasvolsky’s group was very different from that of President Roosevelt. The role of Pasvolsky in the preparations was that of a pragmatic, technical planner, who transformed the presentations pronouncements of Roosevelt’s pompous humanistic globalism, and the broad development- historical perspectives of other politicians, into conceptual material UN planners could use in their work.

The key idea of Pasvolsky’s project was to introduce the notion of a ”world community” on which to base all other reformative structures, which were to constitute the tools, and characteristics of the new WO. It followed logically from that starting point that much of the old diplomatic system would have to be either discarded or replaced." Risto Wallin. The Present Project: Conceptual Foundations of 20th-Century International Relations and World Politics. Retrieved on 2008-04-24.

compare Risto Wallin (October-December 2007). "Movement in the Key Concepts of International Relations". Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32 (4): 361-392. Lynne Rienner. ISSN 0304-3754. 

compare

Risto Wallin. Revolutional Principles of World Citizenship as a Critique of the Natural Law Analogies of the Old Law of Nations: Movementality of IR´S Key Concepts. Retrieved on 2008-04-27.

PRESENT PROJECT: CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF 20TH-CENTURY INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND WORLD POLITICS:

Conceptual History as an Approach Key Concepts in IR Characteristics of Organizational Rhetoric Paradoxes of the Founding Moments Perspectives of Key Founders

THE KEY CONCEPTS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IR STUDIES BEYOND DEVELOPMENT-HISTORICAL EXPLANATIONS

The planning work for the foundation of the UN was not at all a harmonious project from the beginning to end, but, on the contrary, it consisted of a rather chaotic series of meetings and drafted texts that took place amid an atmosphere of excitement, generated by the feeling of witnessing the final struggle for a free world. The meetings were thus characterised by much uncertainty regarding the objectives of the planning work, as well as by the articulation of many different visions of the future world organization. No element was definitive or presupposed before it was selected as a good target for the plans, and even the universal nature of the UN project was not certain before 1943; only after the decision to confer a universal nature on the new organization had been made did it become truly possible to construct the developed form of an organizational unity vocabulary, which as a paradigmatic characteristic of these texts was also very influential on their other conceptual inventions. The political motivations for the foundation of the UN were still based on the catastrophes and problems of the preceding periods, but the vocabularies that were developed now seemed to be increasingly removed from them. Planners started to reflect on the future dynamics of IR, and to look for ways to build a more progressive IR system that would be a radical departure from the old, historical ones. In other words, the collapse of the political and cultural systems, especially in Europe, but to a lesser degree worldwide, was considered to be so complete that there was no reason to think of a continuation of the old system or and additionally it was certainly felt that it would be almost useless to lay the foundations of the new system upon the assumptions of the old one. In that sense the feeling about the visions of history might be comparable to the political climate during the era of the Great Revolutions; it was surely easier to lay the basis for a new vocabulary by using as a point of departure a feeling of radical break from the past than it would have been by using a feeling of continuation. A central political motivation behind the vocabulary innovations was to capture for all the new planning projects, whatsoever was to be their final form, a vision of history that was global in its scope, dominated by nationalistic war-machines and their fatal purposes, and that could never offer any hopes for a lasting peace system; it logically followed from that vision of history that those nationalistic war machines had to be controlled by a new IR system.

2 APPROACH AND METHODS

2.1 WORLD ORGANIZATIONS IN THE IR’S CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVES AND TEXTS OF IR

The basic criticism which it is possible to put forward from the perspective of the changing concepts in the 20th-century IRs documentation, can in particular be levelled at the various studies of world organizations that present a very institutional character. The richest tradition in the field is that which has emphasized development-historical narrative structures. These studies have adopted a development-historical interpretation of the history of world organizations, whereby their connection to each other is best understood within the framework of a predecessor-successor relationship.

It can be argued that the basic problem with that kind of narrative is that its accuracy depends on the reliability of the assumptions it makes about continuity. These narratives have subsequently been discarded whenever even a minor paradigm change in interpretive theory undermined the accuracy of their definitions.

However, the biggest problem with those studies has not been their brief temporal validity, but the loose connections they have established between the theory, historical contexts, and periodizations of IR on the one hand and the vocabularies and concepts used in actual IR documents on the other hand.

2. 2 Conceptual History as an Approach to Grasp Different Vocabularies and Real Paradigm Changes in International Relations

Koselleck’s theoretical framework is particularly well suited to the study of the various contemporary models of IR and WO, in relation to not only their differing emphases on historical models, vocabularies and concepts, but also to the fundamental impact time-layer-based views of history have had on them all.

2. 3 Key Concepts in IR - How Can We Deal with Them

The founding materials of the League of Nations were authored by governmental representatives and ambassadors of the contracting sovereign states in a way that can be considered characteristic of the old, basic diplomacy between sovereign states. In the case of the UN, the key planners were mainly officials of the US State Department, professors and other experts, appointed for post-war planning. This group’s purpose was to create a suitable model for the post-war reconstruction of IR.

Both these preparations happened to place in exceptional circumstances, in the aftermath of the most destructive world wars in history. The UN’s foundation occurred, moreover, in the context of the holocaust and of the most industrialized destruction techniques ever seen. It is almost needless to say that both planning projects were motivated by commonly shared hopes for peaceful life in the near future. The two world wars were regarded as the most tragic moments in human history by all the invited delegates and planners as well as by all the people of the world. It was felt by all that a similar event should be prevented from happening ever again. The key concepts used in UN planning were thus meant to provide an answer to the problem of destructive war, as well as a new base for peaceful relations between all states.

The phrase “key concepts” also refers to the other motivations of UN and League planners. In that part of the study, I attempt to demonstrate that the discourses of world unity, as well as the organizational and communal vocabularies which they used, were, above all, rhetorical techniques whose purpose was to master the broad questions regarding the future nature of IR and world politics. All of this resulted in the creation of concepts that are very broad and in some cases almost tautological in their nature. By means of those concepts, UN planners envisioned world unity, which produced a very abstract and almost mythological view of international relations and world politics. Those concepts were not meant to help construct a model of politics that would be closely based on existing political relations. Rather, the planners’ main strategy was to articulate premises, which they then utilized to build models of the interrelations between states and other entities of world politics and organization. These models were not only removed from real, existing relations, networks, interactions and organizations because the planned ones had yet to be realised, but also because abstractness and future-orientation were their key elements.

It is thus difficult to identify many central political actors in the scholarly literature, because the products of their policies, such as the world organizations, have always been understood in these institutional terms. A genealogical approach to founding situations, however, gives a central importance to the role played by the political actors in the creation of even the more specific juridical and institutional aspects of IR and WO; that, in turn, leads us to pay renewed attention to all the texts they authored.

2.4 On the Characteristics of Organizational Rhetoric in IR and in General, In Relation to the Pursued Dynamical Character of IR’s Concepts

I put forward the argument that the organizational rhetoric and the operational use of time-layers in narration combine to make 20th-century IR vocabularies very different from their nationalistic counterparts, and also much better able to withstand the latter’s possible uses of organizational rhetoric. All of this is consistent with the already-mentioned point that after the first world war IR discourses moved to a more dynamical perspective in order to counteract the perceived irresponsiveness of the old diplomatic system inherited from the ancien régime; the organizational unity rhetoric of the 1940’s was then evolved in order to reform that aspect of the old diplomacy as well as its oligarchic slant, another attribute it had inherited from the ancien régime.

The shortcomings of old organizations was made famous by Robert Michels’ definition in his well-known book Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie, published in 1911. According to him: “Wer Organisation sagt, sagt ohnehin Tendenz zur Oligarchie” (Michels 1911, 32), which of course is not a very uncommon argument when in discussions about diplomacy, IR or WO. The concept of organization has an old, very static conceptual history, although, as has already been indicated, its recent conceptual history is more dynamic. For the majority of history, however, political bodies are indeed functioned along the lines of Michels’ statement - as socio-political command structures promoting authoritarian ideas and norms of behaviour.

In the early years of the concept of organization’s conceptual history, Plato made use of the metaphor of the body in his political pathology and in his description of the foundations of the cosmological order (Dohrn-van Rossum/Organ, 520). In the Middle Ages, the scholastic concept of Corpus played a key part in the vocabulary of the Catholic Church. It made it possible to support arguments for the existence of spiritual unities with ideas originating in natural law (Dohrn-van Rossum/Organ, 533–540; cf. Skinner 1989, Vol. 2). In the context of the Great Revolutions, organic and organizational rhetoric was used in constitutional theory as a dynamical and pompous style of presentation, specifically in arguments for the integral political unity of society considered as a state or nation. It made it possible to view the political system as an abstract and invisible form of continual structural change, but one that contained political bodies and institutions and had very concrete material outcomes. (Cf. Ricour 1976, 48; Perelman 1996, 14).

A more dynamical vocabulary of organic and organizational rhetoric began to emerge rather late. It is best understood as the product of “modern” narratives of politics. (Koselleck 1972, xv). The history of the concept of Organization belongs very much together with those of the concepts of Revolution and Progress. These are Koselleck’s two prime examples of political movement concepts, which were both raised to a key position in the vocabulary of the French Revolution, but they have very different conceptual historical heritages. The political philosophical concepts of revolution, revolutional movement and progress were borrowed from the astrological branch of natural law reasoning. Their old movemental character was kept, but it was shifted to handle the political and societal system in such a manner that the old planetarian context was substituted for the movemental character of societal progress and transformative political unity. All political and historical events were there after grasped within the framework of progressive revolution .

In constitutional thought the movemental character of concepts has been an important element of political discourse since the Sattelzeit. By using those concepts, the contemporary political system has adopted a dynamical character and a rhetorical style characterized by a very strong future orientation. The movemental character of the presentation of authority, and of other similar kinds of modern political vocabulary structures, has more than any other conceptual innovation made it possible to devise the public, democratic, and societal styles of political discourse, and has been constituted the one main counter-construction to very monolithic views of politics.

Organic and organizational rhetoric has also been treated in the same way as Koselleck’s in the various articles collected in the handbook Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe , where it is characterized as a dynamical style of rhetoric . It was very important in the descriptions of the constitutional and political systems of the French Revolution, because it provided a way to combine various political entities and introduce the dynamical perspective of a progressive political system. Organic and organizational rhetoric and vocabulary also provided a language that made it possible to incorporate the French Revolutionary concept of the political and national “general will” of into the constitutional stories narratives of political unity (Cf. Böckenförde/ Organ, 566–574 ). In Germany, the monistic Hegelian theory of the state was the most comprehensive example of the new organic political philosophy in the aftermath of the French Revolution. (cf. Verdross 1937, 3; Heller 1921, Kotkavirta 1996).

The dynamical nature of organic and organizational rhetoric is of course implicitly rejected by the traditional, negative appraisals of the essence of the concept of organization. The most famous example is Robert Michels’s book, which has been mentioned above.

Koselleck has argued that some key concepts’ function is to act as filters (Düse) for all the others. It is those concepts that give its meaning to the broader vocabulary (Koselleck/Staat und Souveränität, 2).

Görg Haverkate has described the concept of organization as one which offers a flexible mode of discourse for constitutional arguments and a suitable way to combine different ideological constructions and viewpoints and put them into one and the same model (Haverkate/Staat und Souveränität, 63).

Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförde has put forward a view oforganizational rhetoric as a dynamical rhetorical style used in juridical and constitutional texts. Through the use of that character, it seeks to convince readers in order to create suitable appeal, rather than to make it by force and necessity (Böckenförde/Organ, 566–567).

According to Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum natural-metaphoric rhetoric contains the suggestion to combine the ”natural” and ”political” contexts in discourse (Cf. Dohrn-van Rossum 1977, 19). Such a combination certainly played an important role in Kant’s use of organic elements in his vocabulary, as a coherent part of his “emancipatorial and political Naturrecht” (Ilting 1978/Naturrecht, 303). In Kantian dualism moral reasoning is kept apart from practical politics. This tension is resolved by the development-historical narrative of a very famous “own cleverness of historical development” which is capable of creating solutions to practical political problems.

These historical and theoretical points were mentioned in order to introduce more interpretative frameworks for understanding contemporary problems related to IR’s move to organizational vocabulary in the 1940’s, and to demonstrate that organizational rhetoric was a very practical and suitable solution for IR’s new vocabulary, because it provided a functional tool that made it possible to answer post-second world war IR’s two central questions: how to build a new world system with the authority to control the activities of its members and how to reform the old system of a static league of states.

IR’s move to organizational rhetoric took place in the context of the emergence of an immense need for a more dynamical, universal, societal and unitarian style of IR and world political discourse. The movemental quality of the new vocabulary and concepts made it possible to achieve a more manageable and political, and less transcendental, character of IR, but it was organizational rhetoric that opened entirely new possibilities for the “dynamics” of IR governmentality and planning.

One unique aspect of IR’s adoption of organizational vocabulary is the rhetorical fact that this vocabulary was introduced in order to offer the most suitable tools for the new style of discourse. It is thus possible to state that both the organizational vocabulary and the new, organic character of IR, were deliberately selected by planners but they were accepted by the broader public on account of the latter’s appealing, persuasive discourse- not imposed in the old, oligarchical fashion. It was a great challenge, from the rhetorical point of view, to achieve a new type of discourse whereby to combine all existing world entities into a new plan for world unity. What was needed for this purpose was a very dynamical style of discourse, and the new organizational vocabulary was the tool required to construct it. Hence, it has again to be stressed that the vocabulary innovations we have been discussing were implemented with specific objectives and rhetorical tactics in mind.

While interpreting these vocabulary innovations, we have to always keep in mind that the task of the reforming IR structures was huge. Planners’ first and most important enterprise, to substitute the vocabulary of a diplomatic league and a temporary peace treaty for that of a world unity system and a perpetual peace, was already revolutionary. To additionally make such a project suitable for the practical construction of a world organization that would have to last for a long time and not be based on oligarchical motivations, but on democratic and liberal values promoting individual human rights- all of this represented a huge challenge for planners, a fact on which scholars have seldom reflected.

The crucial starting point for the study of the new world-organizational, unity vocabulary innovations is the planning group led by Leo Pasvolsky. Pasvolsky’s contribution to UN planning evinced a tendency to be increasingly based on a world unity vocabulary the further the planning work went on. He was not at all a specialist in any kind of philosophical world unity vocabulary before he started to lead one of the UN planning groups, but in the course of the project he became the leading specialist on the most abstract aspects of the new UN vocabulary and concepts, as well as on the rhetorical tactics based on them. He eventually became almost the only person to be able to answer questions concerning the characteristics of the UN world unity vocabulary.

What makes also Pasvolsky a user of a variant of Kantian world unity vocabulary is the nature of his opposition to the old, power politics-based, principles of diplomacy, and how he rejected the hegemonic view of state sovereignty, according to which nation-states are the only orderly political communities, and as such, the only actors of politics in the anarchical world society. Turning this view on its head, he argued that the key factor in world politics is the world community and that the concept of world unity properly implies real organizational unity, and, lastly, that in the new organizational vocabulary, all sub-parts of world unity, were accordingly to be subordinated to it.

In a statement delivered in January 1945, Pasvolsky spoke to US senators and others in attendance about the almost-completed UN project, and explained that, according to the project’s inherent logic, every member nation was an entity which was to be understood in terms of its status as a member of a universal community and world organization. He additionally stated that all member states were coherent parts of world unity, independently of their own willingness to accept this fact (FRUS 1945, Vol 1, 33). In the context of the same definition, Pasvolsky further said that the “universal membership was based on the principle that the organization was an association of nations with common ideals and common standards of behaviour.” Additionally he went on to mention that “all member nations should act in cooperation in accordance with the norms and rules in the international community.” (FRUS 1945, Vol. 1, 33); the statement then formulated a definition of the criterion for membership in the world organization that was suitable from the perspective of world unity . It stated that “states by accepting certain common principles would be thereby eligible to membership in the organization and that therefore membership had not been made to rest on the fact that a nation exist, but rather that a nation lived by certain principles” (FRUS 1945, Vol. 1, 33). The simplest effect of this language was that all nations were, within its framework, totally dependent on the definitions attached to them from the perspective of world organizational unity and community irrespective of what the other aspects of those definitions were.

Pasvolsky’s definitions regarding the new world unity went on for the same reason to reject views of IR, diplomacy and WO, which were anchored in the concept of free political union. The refutation of the notion of a “free union” of “sovereign states”, on which all other IR and WO structures had been based, was one of the main and most tactical reasons for the use of organizational discourse. In contrast to those old ideas organizational rhetoric highlighted the interconnection between the members and entities of world unity, which led to the notion that member nations were going to tie themselves not only to each other, but also to this rhetorically and tactically mythological world unity; through their own forced willingness, or according to the new, autonomous inner logic of IR structures, they were now becoming members of a world unity. The organizational world unity vocabulary also gave very few possibilities of conceiving the new union as an international league of equal powers, although the legal nature of the new organization was fully based on the notion of the signature of a treaty between sovereign powers, and the name of the organization itself was “the United Nations Organization”, recalling the existing military alliance.

It is also obvious that Pasvolsky’s planning group was not the only one to have adopted the new vocabulary. The group which offered the best early list of reasons for the adoption of the new organizational vocabulary was the International Commission for the Organization of Peace . Its report of April 1941 stated five simple, novel points regarding the future IR and WO. They were as follows: “a) Nations must renounce the claim to be the final judge in their controversies with other nations and must submit to the jurisdiction of international tribunals. The basis of peace is justice; and justice is not the asserted claim of any one party, but must be determined by the judgement of the community. b) Nations must renounce the use of force for their own purposes in relations with other nations, except in self-defence. The justification for self- defence must always be subject to review by an international court or the competent body. c) The right of nations to maintain aggressive armaments must be sacrificed in consideration for an assurance of the security of all, through regional and worldwide forces subject to international law and adequate to prevent illegal resorts to international violence. d) Nations must accept certain human and cultural rights in their constitutions and in international covenants. The destruction of civil liberties anywhere creates danger of war. The peace is not secure if any large and efficient population is permanently subject to a control which can create a fanatical national sentiment impervious to external opinion. e) Nations must recognize that their right to regulate economic activities is not unlimited. The world has become an economic unit; all nations must have access to its raw materials and its manufactured articles. The effort to divide the resources of the world into sixty economic compartments is one of the causes of war. The economic problem arising from this effort has increased in gravity with the scientific and industrial progress of the modern world.” (Int. Con. 1941, 200-201).

The next report of the same group was published in April 1942. It delved further into IR theoretical issues, showing that the group was already seeking to introduce the use of organizational vocabulary in order to promote world unity, even though with their discourse was not yet very far developed in that respect. According to the text of the report: “Organization to make international law effective was, however, hampered by exaggerated developments of the idea of sovereignty. A sovereign state at the present time, claims the power to judge its own controversies, to enforce its own conception of its rights, to increase its armaments without limit, to treat its own nationals as it sees fit, and to regulate its economic life without regard to the effect of such regulations upon its neighbours” (Int. Con. 1942, 200).

Another group which contributed to the same task, and whose work was analogous to Pasvolsky’s group’s, was the Group of Jurists, which made plans for “the future of international law”. This group thus specialized in the legal aspects of new world-organizational structures. It published its report in the spring of 1944. According to this document, contemporary problems could not be solved anymore by the old means of a system of sovereign states. In the future, the problems would have to be solved by international means, which stresses the need of an organized world community with a strong world organization. In the words of the report: “A process of international legislation was begun with reference to problems which could not be solved by measures taken by individual states”… ”For the second time in a single generation, most of the peoples of the world have become engaged in a world war. The fact offers insistent challenge to the intelligence of mankind." (ILoF 1944, 2). “The Community of States should be organized on a universal basis. All States which exist or which may come into existence in the future should be included. No provision should be made for the expulsion or withdrawal of any state.” (ILoF 1944, Proposal 1, 9).

“The States of the world form a community, and the protection and advancement of the common interests of their peoples require effective organization of the Community of States.” (ILoF 1944, 5).

The report concluded that in the future, the concept of an existing world community should be incorporated into IR, because it offered the only way to stave off nationalistic and aggressive strivings, so that a dependable IR system, able to guarantee lasting world peace, may emerge.

Additionally, the report argued that there is was a need for a world community, and that such a community could not last without an efficient world organization, which, to put it another way, meant that there could be no precondition for an efficient world organization without a the foundational assumption of a world community (cf. Eagleton 1943).

In conclusion, we may say that organizational rhetoric was introduced little by little, and partly unconsciously, in a series of planning documents. The main driving force behind that process was simply the search for the most practical way to produce a narrative of world unity and community with its characteristic of characterized by an interconnection the interconnectedness of all world entities. The outcome of that process - the foundation of IR planning on organizational vocabulary - was one of the most important events in 20th-century IR; it moved conceptions of IR and WO towards somewhat mythological models because, as has already been said, organizational rhetoric and vocabulary do not foster the construction of narratives based on precise meanings, but, on the contrary, they promote the use of very broad and movemental characteristics, in order to make it possible to view the political system as an abstract and invisible thing that is in a state of continual structural change. Within this theoretical framework, the oligarchical tendency of political bodies described by Michels and others becomes a rhetorical ploy directed against all forms of organization that pertain to oligarchical command cultures. Lastly, the introduction of organizational rhetoric into world unity vocabulary also made it possible to hinder the use of organic and organizational rhetoric in theoretical models of the nation-state; such a use, enabling theoretical models to argue for the existence of autonomous dynamics of living organization in the nation-state, had once been very popular in continental European constitutional discourse.

2. 5 Some Apparent Paradoxes of the Founding Moments Resolved through the Founders Narratives

Another narrative concerning the essence of IR’s organizational vocabulary should be linked to and start from UN planners themselves. It is reasonable in this context to ask questions like such as: who they were, where they came from and what they had done earlier in their lives. Answering those questions will make it possible for us to gain a more detailed understanding of both the foundational narratives and their context. Through such a study it will be possible to analyse the different personal histories of founding years, how and why the founders came to lay the foundations of a new world organizational project, and why they constructed IR’s new vocabulary, an issue we will investigate from two perspectives- tactical and practical. These are all very basic questions, which, however, have not often been explored by scholars, perhaps due in part to the difficulties the complexity of the new IR vocabulary has caused for them.

The identity, as well as temporal and spatial contexts of UN planners, constitute good starting points in our quest to fully understand the complex nature of their numerous innovations: the new organizational vocabulary and planning rhetoric, pursued governmental mechanisms and critiques of the old diplomatic system. The first apparent paradox of UN planning, which concerns the ideology of the whole project, is that the plans for the construction of a new organizational vocabulary and concepts were produced by a group of planners who were working for the Department of State of the United States. US foreign political and federal constitutional thinking has been rather characterized by the minimal terms of its societal, organizational and world unity vocabularies. The paradox also concerns the history of US constitutional thought, inasmuch as its concept of Union has been articulated as a strongly and openly political project. In that sense, it has also been a very ”anti-organic” project, which does not suppose or aim to create a nation or society, in the sense of a body- political entity or a societal actor in itself. This issue is treated by Geoffrey Gorer in his book The Americans. He argues that a crucial difference between the conceptual systems of Europe and America, is to be found in the fact that ”the European Metaphoric is organic and the American mechanist ” (Gorer 1948, 25). Gorer’s “European discourse” refers mainly to the rhetorical and vocabulary innovations of the French Revolution. Because of this dualism, the League’s rhetoric of a political union for a general peace suited very well with US constitutional concepts, but the move to the new organizational world unity description of IR and WO was a very strange and uncharacteristic one.

A second aspect of this paradox relates to the vocabulary tradition of US foreign policy from the early 19th century onwards. American revolutionism’s 19th-century rhetoric of world citizenship was characterized by the principle of anti-colonialism and the notion of “free republics”. It is also through those conceptual means that the US government legitimized the Monroe Doctrine and justified its own foreign interventions. (Cf. Hull 1948, 308–315).

From the perspective of the study of interwar IR sources and planning rhetoric, the counter-dualism of Gorer’s argument is also a bit impressionistic, and orientates the reader towards development -historical approaches. In the 1920’s and 1930’s various scholars already conceived of the old diplomacy and the static concepts of IR and WO that underpinned it as constituting a deeply flawed system. These views gave rise to calls for a more dynamical system of IR and a new world- organizational approach of the planning of the field’s interactions. The most pressing issues, which made systematic conceptual change possible, were employee’s working conditions, “the economic consequences of peace” (Keynes, 1920), “The Problem of Revision in International Law.” (J. Kunz, 1926), and “the problem of change in politics” in relation to IR (J. F. Williams, 1928, 1932). All those issues were interconnected, and also related to the systemic flaws of the League, which themselves were due to the contradictions inherent in its wartime origins and its conception as a static solution to essentially regional problems. From the perspective of UN planners in the 1940’s, those issues were still considered to be the most pressing ones. Critics who publicized them became famous in part because their view work made it possible to clearly see that the League’s conceptual foundations had been couched in a static vocabulary.

The impetus for the development of a new dynamic, organizational IR vocabulary thus stemmed from criticisms of the League’s system, which were made by various commentators in Europe and America. This critical activity encouraged UN planners to view and handle the League as a failed opportunity and as a product of the old European diplomacy, and, as a result, to turn it into a counter-model for the new, dynamic world organization.

In order to carry out their project, UN planners also had to devise replacements for the other kind of static concepts: the old humanitarian, moral conceptual unities, which broadened and softened the natural law analogies of the old law of nations an all-embracing, universal moral responsibility, and which were very static, politically speaking - for all those reasons, they had to be replaced with more progressive ideas.

The powerful criticism of the lack of dynamical aspects in the conceptual foundations of the League represented a very promising development for proponents of organizational world unity vocabularies, in particular for those of the Kantian tradition. In the past their positions had been mostly the academical and critical one (cf. Kelsen 1934, 1944, 1951).

As I have previously mentioned, it is my view that the interpretation of 20th- century IR’s source materials requires a careful study of the criticisms that were made of the old diplomatic order and law of nations. Those criticisms originated from two different sources: the conceptual tradition of Kantian Weltbürgerrecht, which was also strongly influenced by the German notion of socialitas, and the world-citizenship vocabulary tradition of American revolutionism.

These older historical dimensions are discussed together with the contemporary context of the world-organizational planning in order to help elucidate the intellectual roots of planners’ conceptual innovations, which made the planning project possible, as well as the reasons why the State Department’s UN planning group had such a crucial role in the construction of the new, organizational world unity vocabulary.

2.5.1 The Differences in the Perspectives of Key Founders

US President F. D. Roosevelt was one of the key actors in the context of the foundation of the UN. However, while he certainly entertained strong views on the future of world organizations, as far as we know he never set them out, and for that reason they remain, to this day, known only in outline. In relation to the UN project, he was in effect a spokesman for the heritage of American revolutionism, as he articulated his political program around the simple notion of human freedoms. These, according to him, constituted the old “American constitutional roots”, which the whole world should rediscover and abide by if it were to live in peace and harmony. Roosevelt offered the United States as an example of the free, open and anti- nationalistic society to the belligerent world. The most famous description of his vision on of the future IR is based on the individual freedom rights, which he called the Four Freedoms . A variation on these those same basic ideas was also used in the text of the Atlantic Charter, which pave the way for the US participation to the war against enemy governments, and presented the block of the allied nations as the belligerent side of the free and open world. (see Atlantic Charter).

That the basic and unadulterated rhetoric of freedom should have seemed to be the most suitable language for a US President in a time of war is of course no cause for surprise. Roosevelt’s message had to be kept simple and clear enough for all audiences, and it had to make it clear, in particular, that the war was being fought against criminal governments. This simplicity also helped to keep open all strategical and tactical questions concerning the war, as well as future IR. After the death of Roosevelt, Harry Truman continued with this rhetorical style till the end of the UN preparations, including at the conference of San Francisco in 1945, where he expressed only slightly more complex and future-oriented views about the freedom of all the people of the world, who must never again be indifferent to, but must be ready to tell apart the good from the bad and view their own actions as universal and political (Uncio 1, 684).

Many researchers have attempted to study the planning of UN UN planning in conjunction with the New Deal program of the Roosevelt government, in particular because the US war policy was known as the New Deal of War in some circles, and said to be formulated by Vice President Henry Wallace. From the perspective of the actual planning materials this approach leaves a little to be desired. An exclusive focus on President Roosevelt, Vice President Wallace, Secretary of State Cordell Hull or Under-Secretary of State Stettinius, is to be avoided, because it is certainly too restrictive to allow us to see the whole spectrum of UN planning, although it would not be wise either to widen the scope of our study to too many actors. However, the more we elect to focus on UN planning’s conceptual innovations, the more people such as Leo Pasvolsky, Benjamin Gerig, Quincy Wright, Clyde Eagleton, Sumner Welles, Isaiah Bowman, Benjamin V. Cohen, Green H. Hackworth, Leo Pasvolsky, James T. Shotwell, Joseh C. Grew, Adolf Berle, Dean Acheson and Harley Notter become relevant to our study. Roosevelt himself was much focusing on the warfare aims mainly devoting his attention to the issue of war aims, keeping his position about the nature of the future world organization open. He also included in his speeches the ideas about the future IR and WO, which had already been published in the planning reports. A general lack of time, due in particular to the requirements of the war effort, meant that scholars and officials such as Leo Pasvolsky, especially in the case of vocabulary construction, did the actual planning work to a very large extent.

It was not until recent years that Leo Pasvolsky started being acknowledged as one of the key UN planners. Indeed, if we had to pick the single most influential individual with reference to UN planning, it would have to be Pasvolsky. He was appointed Head of the Office of Post-World War planning in September 1943. His task was to formulate plans for the post-war peace settlement and the new world organization. In that capacity, Pasvolsky was the key person in the United States’ planning group whose task was to formulate the post-war structures of IR and WO.

Due to the differences in their respective roles, the planning rhetoric of Pasvolsky’s group was very different from that of President Roosevelt. The role of Pasvolsky in the preparations was that of a pragmatic, technical planner, who transformed the presentations pronouncements of Roosevelt’s pompous humanistic globalism, and the broad development- historical perspectives of other politicians, into conceptual material UN planners could use in their work.

The key idea of Pasvolsky’s project was to introduce the notion of a ”world community” on which to base all other reformative structures, which were to constitute the tools, and characteristics of the new WO. It followed logically from that starting point that much of the old diplomatic system would have to be either discarded or replaced.

Another important consequence of the introduction of the notion of a world community into the vocabulary of IR was that it made it possible for planners to move world-organizational discourse closer to the concepts of constitutional and national unity-building, which originated in the “general will” tradition of political philosophy. This represented again a very abstract conceptual ploy, whose purpose was to create a feeling of (progressive) movement around the key concepts of the new IR constructions. The constitutional, progressive-developmental and unity aspects of the new world-organizational rhetoric were already discussed in more detail above. Suffice it to say here that within the framework of the new IR vocabulary, those aspects were intended to operate in very different ways than they had in their original, constitutionalist-nationalist, and “general will” -based context. As I have already explained, the new organizational unity rhetoric followed it own tactical and srategical rules from the moment it was introduced into the field of IR.

It is also important to realize that, from the perspective of conceptual planning, the purpose of all those conceptual innovations was to challenge the old IR paradigms. The new organizational vocabulary was deliberately conceived to achieve that purpose. As had been the case with the earlier, constitutionalist-nationalist unity projects organizational rhetoric was used to create the foundational scheme for the new world unity enterprise. It then became possible to add a more concrete layer around that theoretical inner core-namely the new diplomatic and legal regulations and codes of conduct- and, finally, to implement an adaptive and progressive IR system, fully able to handle perpetual change, as had been promised.

Additionally, a very broad rhetoric was needed to put together the very wide schemes concerning many topics the many different strands of contemporary IR thinking. It was needed in order to have all those strands included in one and the same vocabulary and in order to build a new, functional IR system, based on the new narrative of a coherent, ordered field of IR, contrasted to the old, anarchic one. For that reason, universal human rights, for example, which were, by definition, considered to be the birthright of all human beings, were also re-established by the charter of the new world organization, representing, as it were, the founding document of a newborn humanity. The same world-organizational framework was applied to the other subparts and concepts of IR, such as the field of international law, or the concepts of “peace” and “member nation”.

Through the very abstract vocabulary of organizational unity rhetoric, it became possible to refer to the existing political conditions of politics on the level of very high abstraction on a very high level of abstraction. This constituted an important advantage as well as a significant problem of this rhetoric, since it resulted in a lack of precise references to the specific time, place, action(s) and actor(s). The use of” all-embracing concepts and vocabulary was the key tactic of UN planners; its purpose was to enable them to obtain complete control over all interactions of world politics- whether the specific actors were states or not. In other words, by invoking such a general and universal approach, UN planners were proclaiming that no political actor could be left outside the new world organization, and, because of this, their rhetoric achieved truly global dimensions, something the League’s could never do.

It is also possible to claim, from the perspective of vocabulary structures, that it is surprise that the initials “UN” have been treated in a moral, metaphysical and legal way rather than a practical, political and historical one. Many debates concerning the interpretation of world organizational entities, actors, political structures and “deeper structures”, such as moral evaluations of IR, are very obviously related to the constructions created during the founding process of the UN. The problems of the above- mentioned interpretations, which have been more impressionistic than analytical in their approach, are also due, to a large extent, to the complexity of the conceptual changes which took place after the signature of the League’s Covenant and before that of the UN’s Charter. There were interpretative problems hanging over the planning process even at the time, concerning the relationship between what had been planned and drafted in during the preparations and what was to be signed eventually. This atmosphere of uncertainty was also present in the meetings between U.S. Senators and key UN planners.

The time available for planning was also expected to be limited. The signature of the Charter was to take place at the San Francisco conference, ”before the war is over and the world public opinion gets tired of the topic”, as Jan Smuts put it (Uncio I /Smuts, 67). Some of the delegates at the San Francisco conference were unsure about what the new charter and the acceptance of this new organizational framework would mean for the future. However, it was also a peace settlement that they could not reject. The members of the key-planning group, for their part, were not worried about the abstractness of the new vocabulary and concepts. On the contrary, they used leveraged this high level of abstraction to create the core for the rest of the project. They were not worried about the possibility that the new world-organizational project will might lose its connection.

Based on the documents pertaining to the last phase in the planning process, it is possible to find out argue that nobody besides Leo Pasvolsky had the readiness to answer the main questions about the nature and key character characteristics of new world organizational entity. Not even the so-called “father of the United Nations”, the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Senator, and long-term Secretary of State Cordell Hull was ready to answer those complicated questions.

Pasvolsky’s project was very abstract, and theoretical but also quite simple. Its foundations were the conceptual meta-structures we have discussed, in order whose purpose was to create the conceptual preconditions for a new paradigmatic vocabulary, as well as for the whole new system of global governmental structures. “ Constitutionalism” or “world-citizenship” were not words he used much, and his references to the “new international law” were limited few in number. The new world unity vocabulary was the one essential stratagem of the planning work. It made it possible to convince its intended world audience that the new world organization and the principles it embodied- peaceful international relations, human rights and the rule of international law- were to be taken seriously.

From the perspective of the new project’s prospects of success, it was imperative that it be understood as a radical departure from the past, and a big step towards a more united world (See Eagleton 1942, Wright 1946, Lasswell 1946 and Kelsen 1950). Most importantly, the foundation of the UN represented a unique opportunity to overhaul international law – the traditional code of conduct in IR; as the Carnegie planning report stated, this was the beginning of the ”International Law of the Future” (Carnegie 1944). The first postulate of the Carnegie plan for the future international law articulated a new definition of the field of IR, pointing out that, from then on “the States of the world [would] form a community, and the protection and advancement of the common interests of their peoples [would] require effective organization of the Community of States.” (Carnegie 1944, 5).

The conceptual history approach and the study of the vocabularies used in world organizational planning enable us to direct serious criticisms at the various moral, legal, institutional and functional constructions of post-WWII theories. From the foundational perspective of unity rhetoric it is explicitly self-evident that the UN and its Charter must play a central role in interpretations of world politics. But only through a genealogical reading of the foundation of the UN does it become easier to grasp the substance of different authors’ arguments, and to determine how right or wrong they are when they interpret the nature of UN unity and its main texts. From the perspective of UN planning, the meanings given to the UN system and the UN Charter are many times often odd and merely fit a particular author’s starting assumptions. One of the most important reasons for that inaccuracy in IR studies has been the very poorly understood move to a world-organizational rhetoric, and its implications for the field’s politics.

All historical constructions are of course constantly in motion. They are reused for tactical reasons in contemporary political battles, which makes it harder to speak about them in relation to present-day and future politics. In that sense concepts’ meanings can never be pure, clear or stable. Out of the various time-layers, the past is certainly the most suitable for the empirical methods of IR studies. As I have already mentioned, the methods of conceptual history make it possible to determine the actual conceptual models that were selected in various historical periods and the actual conceptual changes that took place in different contemporary contexts. This kind of reading enables us to recognize and stay away from the main interpretative pitfall of handling different texts and contexts as parts of one and the same developmental story. It also makes us more ready to notice the reuses and reformulations of the main tools of universal unity arguments, and argue that those tools themselves are hardly ever novel in the true sense of the word, but rather recycled from older narratives.

In relation to the way conceptual change works, it is easy to see that after the grim political climate of the Cold War, and in the aftermath of the perestroïka, there dawned a new era in international politics that made world-citizenship rhetoric pertinent once again. The new discourse naturally reused some basic ideas of the UN world unity rhetoric, and popularized again Kant’s Weltbürgerrecht, thus adding a new chapter to the history of world unity vocabularies’ variations. From the perspective of my work, the most interesting aspects of the 1990’s world unity and Weltbürgerrecht boom are that it demonstrates how few conceptual and vocabulary bases we actually have for the development of world unity vocabularies, how poorly the latter are understood from the points of view of political and strategical planning and, finally, how strong the nationalistic imaginary still is. Indeed, the nationalistic imaginary still dominates the nationalistic narrative structures of IR theories, and world politics exists in its own closed moral sphere.

This introduction has now presented many solid reasons to carry out a study of the topics related to the construction of world unity and world- citizenship vocabularies through the methods of conceptual history. The scrutiny of the historical foundations of the UN world unity vocabulary isn’t very helpful in itself, but in order to understand the historical dimensions of the present, the study of the historical foundations of world unity structures represents a very useful starting point, since those world unity structures still constitute a fundamental part of the current IR framework; and it will be no less useful to make visible the conceptual structures related to the use of time-layers in political narration, since they are key elements of almost all future-oriented political narratives.

==stuff4 “Leo Pasvolsky: Architect of the Postwar World?”, paper presented to the Transatlantic Studies Conference, University of Dundee, Scotland, July 2006

Dr. David Woolner Marist College

[edit] NYT obit

DR. LEO PASVOLSKY OF U. N. FAME; Economist, Ex-Aide at State Department Wrote Charter of World Organization

Washington, May 6,-Dr. Leo Pasvolsky, prominent economist who prepared the final draft of the United Nations Charter, died unexpectedly last night of a heart attack. He was 59 years old. He had remained at home yesterday with a slight cold. Friends said he never had had heart trouble, but had suffered from high blood pressure.

Dr. Pasvolsky, who left the State Department in 1946 after twelve years of Government service, was director of the international studies group of the Brookings Institution

At the Unitied Nations conference at San Francisco in 1945, Dr. Pasvolsky was assigned to two of the hardest jobs in the Charter drafting. His task was to reconcile the inter-American security system and the Act of Chapultepec, which had been signed by the American states that year, with the broader over-all security aims of the United Nations.

[edit] Helped Break Deadlock

Moreover, when the great powers were deadlocked on the veto and the conference faced possible failure because of the fear of smaller nations that the Big Five would act irresponsibly, Dr. Pasvolsky negotiated an "interpretation" of the veto power that was accepted by the Big Five. This made possible final agreement on the compact, after which he prepared the final draft of the Charter.

At his death, he was engaged in an extensive study of the origin and history of the United Nations.

During his State Department service, Dr. Pasvolsky worked closely with former Secretary Cordell Hull in the development of reciprocal trade agreements.

Dr. Pasvolsky was born in Pavlograd, Russia, and came to the United States with his parents at the age of 12. The family first settled in Philadelphia, later moving to New York.

He attended the College of the City of New York and was graduated in 1916. He took graduate studies at Columbia University and the Universtiy of Geneva. In 1937 he received his Ph. D. from the Brookings Institution.

[edit] Many Books Published

He had joined the institution in 1922 as a member of its research staff. During the next ten years, he wrote many books on the economics of communism, war debts and monetary problems.

In 1934 he joined the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, going later to the State Department, where he served as chief of the division of special research, supervisor of the division of political and economic studies and executive director of the committee on post-war programs.

He resigned as head of the international organization and security affairs division in 1946, when he felt that he could leave that field to the United Nations. He then returned to the Brookings Institution.

Dr. Pasvolsky was a member of the United States delegation to the United Nations monetary and financial conference at Bretton Woods, N.H., in 1944. He attended the Dumbarton Oaks talks, and a year later, in 1945, presided over the first session of the United Nations Preparatory Commission in London.

Surviving are his widow, Christine McCormick Pasvolsky; two sisters, Mrs. Anthony Elnett of New York and Mrs. Carla Sattler of Long Beach, Calif., and two brothers, Elias of New York and Capt. Valentine Pasvolsky of Ridgway, N.J.