The Dumbarton Oaks Conference

On 21 August 1944, at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in the Georgetown district of Washington, Secretary of State Cordell Hull opened talks officially known as the Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization. Around the table sat representatives of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union; the Chinese were to join only in the second part of the proceedings. For seven weeks diplomats, lawyers and military men from first three and then four great powers drafted the blueprint for an organisation that was to replace the League of Nations and that in their papers already bore the name “United Nations”.

It is often stressed that the conference established the basic structure of the UN. That is accurate, with one qualification: on 21 August the talks were only beginning, and they ended on 7 October. The “Dumbarton Oaks proposals” agreed there defined the organs of the future organisation, but the two hardest questions – the voting procedure in the Security Council and the Soviet demand for separate seats for the union republics – remained open and were settled only in 1945.

From the Atlantic Charter to Moscow

The idea of a new organisation was older than the conference. In the Atlantic Charter of August 1941 Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had looked forward to “a wider and permanent system of general security”, although Roosevelt, mindful of the League of Nations’ defeat in the US Senate, was unwilling at that time to speak of any specific institution. The Declaration by United Nations of 1 January 1942 gave a name to the coalition fighting the Axis powers, but it was a wartime alliance, not an organisation.

For most of the war the President thought in terms of the “four policemen”: the United States, Great Britain, the USSR and China, which after victory would keep the peace, oversee the disarmament of the defeated and maintain order in their own parts of the world. From 1942 teams at the State Department led by Leo Pasvolsky, Hull’s special assistant, worked on a draft charter, and in September and November 1943 both houses of Congress passed resolutions (the Fulbright and Connally resolutions) supporting American participation in an international peace organisation. This time, unlike in 1919, American public opinion was on the President’s side.

The breakthrough came at the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in October 1943. In the Four-Nation Declaration, signed by the Chinese ambassador as well, the fourth point spoke of the need to establish “at the earliest practicable date” a general international organisation based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states. A month later, at the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt presented Joseph Stalin with his sketch of three bodies: an assembly of all members, an executive committee and the “four policemen”. Stalin asked at the time whether the small European states would accept rule by four great powers and suggested regional organisations instead, but in the end he accepted the principle of a single world organisation.

By the spring of 1944 the State Department had a draft ready, and on 15 June Roosevelt publicly announced its general principles. A few weeks before Dumbarton Oaks, in July, 44 countries meeting at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire agreed a monetary system with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Washington talks were to complete this post-war order with its political and military component.

The Georgetown mansion and the delegations

The venue was chosen to be close to the State Department but away from reporters. Dumbarton Oaks, a nineteenth-century house with gardens on the heights of Georgetown, had belonged since 1940 to Harvard University, to which the diplomat Robert Woods Bliss and his wife Mildred had given it as an institute for Byzantine studies. Bliss had offered to put the estate at Hull’s disposal as early as 1942, and at the end of June 1944 Harvard’s president, James Conant, renewed the offer, which the State Department accepted. The sessions were held in the former music room, and the grounds were closed to the press, which protested from the very first days.

The talks were conducted by delegations of diplomats, lawyers and military advisers. The Americans were led by Under Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, who on 22 August, at the Soviet ambassador’s suggestion, became permanent chairman of the whole conference. The British were headed by the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, supported among others by Gladwyn Jebb, while the ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, replaced him in the final phase after Cadogan returned to London. The Soviet delegation was led by the 35-year-old ambassador to the United States, Andrei Gromyko.

The Chinese did not sit at the same table as the Russians. The USSR was not at war with Japan and did not want to provoke it by deliberating jointly with a country Japan had been fighting since 1937; nor, as historians of the conference emphasise, did it regard China as a power equal to the other three. The conference was therefore divided into two parts: a Soviet-British-American phase from 21 August to 28 September and a Chinese-British-American phase from 29 September to 7 October. The Chinese delegation was led by the ambassador in London, Wellington Koo.

The real work was done not in plenary sessions but in a joint steering committee of the heads of delegation and in subcommittees on organisation, security and international justice. The basis for discussion was the American draft, the most comprehensive of the three that the delegations had exchanged before the conference. The British and the Russians presented their own memoranda, and the differences between them turned out to be smaller than the State Department had feared.

The organisation in outline

The shape of the future organisation that emerged from several weeks of work has largely survived to this day. Membership was to be open to all “peace-loving states”, beginning with the signatories of the Declaration by United Nations and the states associated with them. All members were to sit in the General Assembly, which could discuss any matter, make recommendations, approve the budget and elect the members of the other organs, but which had no power of decision on questions of peace and war.

That power was given to the Security Council, which bore “primary responsibility” for maintaining peace. It was to have eleven members, including five permanent ones – the United States, Great Britain, the USSR, China and, “in due course”, France – and six elected for two-year terms. In line with the Soviet position no sixth permanent seat was added: on 28 August the Americans mentioned that they might propose a permanent seat for Brazil, but Cadogan and Gromyko received the idea coolly and it was dropped. All agreed, on the other hand, that France would have a permanent seat regardless of whether its government had by then been formally recognised.

Unlike the League of Nations, the new organisation was to have teeth. The Council could determine the existence of a threat to the peace or an act of aggression and decide on sanctions, from the severance of economic relations to the use of armed forces, which members were to place at its disposal under special agreements. The Russians proposed a permanent international air corps; in the end states undertook to hold national air force contingents ready for combined action. Planning was to be in the hands of a military staff committee made up of the chiefs of staff of the Council’s permanent members.

The draft also provided for an International Court of Justice as the principal judicial organ, a secretariat headed by a secretary-general, and an Economic and Social Council subordinate to the Assembly. The latter was pressed by the Americans and the British; the Soviet delegation wanted an organisation concerned solely with security and agreed to economic and social matters only after long discussions. The question of dependent territories and the former League of Nations mandates was set aside: the American Chiefs of Staff, with Japan’s Pacific islands in mind, did not yet want to discuss it, and the British wanted no talks on the future of their colonies.

The veto and the sixteen republics

On voting in the Security Council the three delegations agreed on the starting point: on important matters a decision required the consent of all the permanent members. This was the veto, which both the Russians and the Americans wanted, the latter aware that the Senate would not accept an organisation able to send American troops into action against Washington’s will. The dispute concerned the case in which a permanent member was itself a party to a conflict. On 28 August the Americans, strongly backed by the British, set out their position that a state involved in a dispute should not vote on matters concerning it, whether or not it was a great power. The Soviet delegation regarded this as a “retreat” from the principle of great-power unanimity and insisted on a veto without exceptions.

The same day Gromyko made a second demand: all sixteen union republics of the USSR were to be original members of the organisation. This was linked to the amendments to the Soviet constitution of 1 February 1944, which formally gave the republics the right to conduct their own foreign relations and to have their own military formations. Cadogan replied that his government would have to discuss the republics’ international status with Moscow, and the Americans that they would need to consider the matter. According to Stettinius, Roosevelt ordered the demand to be kept strictly secret; in American documents it was henceforth referred to as the “X matter”. The President feared that if it became known, Congress and the public would reject the whole organisation, and he is said to have remarked that in that case the United States could demand 48 seats for its states.

Both issues were referred to the highest level. Roosevelt wrote to Stalin that raising the question of the republics before the organisation had been established could endanger the whole undertaking, and at the beginning of September he received Gromyko at the White House and explained to him that in the American tradition a party to a dispute did not sit among the judges. Stalin did not give way in his replies: he stressed the importance of Ukraine and Belarus and defended the unanimity principle as the condition for cooperation among the great powers. Gromyko let it be understood that the USSR would not join the organisation without a full veto. The British looked for a compromise formula, but none was found before the end of the Soviet-British-American phase of the talks.

All the while the talks went on in the shadow of the war in Europe. As the delegations assembled, the uprising in Warsaw had been going on for three weeks, and Moscow was refusing to let Allied aircraft land on its airfields. The Polish government-in-exile, a signatory of the Declaration by United Nations, took no part in the talks on an organisation of which it was to be a member. The same was true of the other smaller allies: the draft was written exclusively by the great powers and presented to the rest only after the talks had ended.

The Chinese phase and the proposals of 7 October

The Soviet-British-American phase ended on 28 September, and the talks with the Chinese began the next day. Koo’s delegation accepted the text agreed by the three powers and made no attempt to reopen it. It did, however, put forward several additions: that disputes should be settled with due regard for the principles of justice and international law, that the General Assembly should concern itself with the development of that law, and that the organisation should promote cooperation in education and culture. The Americans and the British considered them sensible but did not want to alter a text already agreed with the Russians; it was decided that the four powers would put them forward jointly later.

On 7 October the delegates adopted the “Proposals for the Establishment of a General International Organization”, and on 9 October the governments of the four powers made them public. The document had twelve chapters. In the chapter on the Security Council, where the voting provision should have been, there was only a note that the matter was “still under consideration”. There was not a word about the Soviet republics.

Significance of the conference

Dumbarton Oaks was the first place where the victorious powers sat down to plan the post-war world together, and the only one of the great wartime conferences at which the work was done chiefly by officials and lawyers rather than leaders. It was there that the skeleton of the United Nations took shape, with power divided between a universal assembly and a council with permanent seats for the great powers. Unlike the League, where decisions of the Council required the consent of all its members, only the great powers received the privilege of the veto; it was the only arrangement to which Washington and Moscow could both agree. The published proposals also launched a broad public debate in the United States, which Roosevelt needed in order to avoid the fate of Woodrow Wilson.

The disputed questions were settled a few months later. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 the American voting formula was adopted: the veto did not apply to procedural matters, and a permanent member that was a party to a dispute had to abstain in decisions on its peaceful settlement, but not in decisions on sanctions. Stalin reduced his demand to two additional seats, which went to the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs. At Yalta it was also decided to convene a founding conference in San Francisco.

The San Francisco Conference met from 25 April to 26 June 1945, and its basis was the Dumbarton Oaks text, supplemented by the Yalta amendments, the Chinese proposals and the demands of the smaller states. Poland, over whose representation the USSR and the West were in dispute, had no delegation there; it signed the Charter of the United Nations in October 1945 as a founding member. The Charter came into force on 24 October 1945. Cordell Hull, who had resigned in November 1944, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945, and in 1946 Gromyko became the USSR’s first permanent representative to the UN, where in the organisation’s early years he repeatedly used the veto he had fought for at Dumbarton Oaks.