The second phase of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference

In the second half of September 1944 the talks at the Dumbarton Oaks mansion in Washington, which had opened on 21 August, were nearing the end of their first part. The delegations of the United States, Britain and the USSR had already agreed a draft charter for a general international organisation, but could not resolve their dispute over voting in the Security Council. Once they had finished, on 29 September, the Chinese took their places at the same table. This second, Chinese–British–American part of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference lasted until 7 October and completed work on the document that became the basis of the United Nations Charter.

Some chronologies state that a second Dumbarton Oaks conference, intended to lay down guidelines for the UN, opened on 21 September. The date they give is inaccurate. The conference records and histories of it, including material published by the Dumbarton Oaks institute, date the opening of the second phase to 29 September, the day after the Soviet part ended on 28 September. Nor was it a separate conference: it was the second part of the same talks. No breakthrough was recorded on 21 September; the delegations of the three powers were then polishing their joint text and waiting to see whether Moscow would accept a compromise on the veto.

Why two parts

The talks were split because of Moscow’s policy towards Japan. The Soviet Union was bound to Tokyo by the neutrality pact of April 1941 and did not want to sit at the same table as a government that had been at war with Japan since 1937. Soviet diplomats also made no secret of the fact that they did not regard China as a power equal to the other three. For Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on the other hand, China’s presence was a matter of principle: for years he had spoken of the “four policemen”, and in October 1943 the Chinese ambassador had signed the declaration of the Moscow Conference, in which the four states announced the creation of a general organisation. The compromise was that the Russians and the Chinese would talk with the Americans and the British in turn, while the final document would be common to all four.

The Soviet part went on longer than planned, because the dispute over the veto and the Soviet demand for separate seats for the sixteen union republics had moved into the correspondence between Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin and remained unresolved. In the second half of September the delegations accepted that they would not reach agreement on the matter. They decided to close their part of the talks with a text in which the provision on voting in the Security Council was replaced by a note that the question was “still under consideration”. The Soviet delegation concluded its sessions on 28 September.

The Chinese delegation

The Chinese part opened on 29 September. The delegation was led by the Republic of China’s ambassador in London, Wellington Koo, one of China’s most experienced diplomats, who back in 1919 had represented his country at the Paris Peace Conference and refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles because it handed Japan the rights in Shandong. His delegation included the ambassador in Washington, Wei Daoming, the Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Victor Hoo, and General Shang Zhen, head of the Chinese military mission in the United States. On the British side, after Sir Alexander Cadogan had left for London, the delegation was led by the ambassador, Lord Halifax.

The Chinese arrived at a bad moment for their country. The Japanese Ichi-Go offensive was stripping them of one province after another and of the American airfields in southern China, and on 19 September General Joseph Stilwell had handed Chiang Kai-shek a sharply worded message from Roosevelt demanding that Stilwell be given command of the Chinese armies. The Stilwell affair was still running while Koo was holding talks in Washington, and it undermined the image of China as one of the four great powers. All the more reason for the Chinese delegation to avoid conflict and stress its agreement with the Americans.

The Chinese amendments

The talks were held in the same former music room as in August, chaired by Edward Stettinius. The Americans and the British presented the Chinese with the text agreed with the Russians and made it clear from the outset that they did not want to reopen it, since any change would require Moscow’s consent all over again. Koo’s delegation accepted this condition. Before the conference the Chinese had sent in a memorandum of their own, but they did not fight for its contents; their main aim was to confirm China’s place among the permanent members of the future Security Council, and the text of the three powers already gave them that.

The Chinese did, however, put forward several additions, concerning not the structure of the organisation but its principles. They proposed that disputes be settled with due regard for the principles of justice and international law, that the General Assembly initiate studies and make recommendations for the development of that law, and that the organisation promote cooperation in education and culture. These were the demands of a militarily weaker state which, between the wars, had experienced the League of Nations’ helplessness in the face of Japanese aggression in Manchuria, and which wanted the new organisation to rest on law and not solely on the will of the great powers. The Americans and the British considered the proposals reasonable but did not write them into the text; it was agreed that the four powers would submit them jointly later. This happened in the spring of 1945, and all three found their way into the Charter of the United Nations.

The Chinese part was short and calm. Between sessions the delegates went on excursions, among them to Virginia, where Stettinius received them at his estate. For Chinese diplomacy, which had for years been striving to have China treated as a great power, simply taking part in these talks mattered more than their details.

The proposals of 7 October

On 7 October 1944 the delegates adopted the “Proposals for the Establishment of a General International Organization”, and on 9 October the governments of the four states published the text simultaneously. The document, in twelve chapters, provided for a General Assembly of all members; a Security Council with five permanent seats (for the four powers and, “in due course”, France) and six non-permanent ones; an International Court of Justice; an Economic and Social Council; and a secretariat headed by a Secretary-General. The Security Council was to bear primary responsibility for peace and to have at its disposal armed forces placed at its service by the member states – something the League of Nations had always lacked. The chapter on voting in the Council merely noted that the question was still under consideration, and the Soviet republics were not mentioned in the text at all.

The publication of the proposals opened a public debate, above all in the United States, where the State Department launched a wide-ranging information campaign, and in the countries that had not taken part in the talks. The smaller allies, including the Polish government in London, could see the text only after it had been published. Canada, Australia and the Latin American states criticised the privileges of the great powers and the weak role of the Assembly.

Place in the war

The second phase of Dumbarton Oaks completed the work begun in August: from then on the plan for the organisation was a project of four powers, not merely three. In September, while the Soviet part was still in progress, Roosevelt and Churchill at the Quebec Conference dealt with the occupation zones in Germany and the war against Japan, leaving the post-war organisation to the diplomats. The unresolved questions of the veto and the Soviet republics returned at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, where the American voting formula was adopted and Stalin settled for two additional seats, for Ukraine and Belorussia. At the San Francisco Conference in the spring of 1945 the Dumbarton Oaks text, supplemented by the Yalta decisions, the Chinese amendments and the demands of the smaller states, became the basis of the United Nations Charter, signed on 26 June 1945.

China, which in September 1944 was living through the worst period of its war with Japan and a crisis in its relations with Washington, obtained at Dumbarton Oaks what it wanted most: a permanent seat on the Security Council. It was held by the Republic of China and, from 1971, by the People’s Republic of China.