The signing of the UN Charter

On 26 June 1945, in the auditorium of the Veterans War Memorial Building in San Francisco, representatives of 50 states put their signatures to the Charter of the United Nations – the agreement that brought the United Nations Organization into being. The ceremony closed the United Nations Conference on International Organization, known simply as the San Francisco Conference, which had been sitting since 25 April. The war in Europe had ended six weeks earlier; in the Pacific it was still going on. President Harry Truman, who had flown in for the closing session, told the delegates that between the victory in Europe and the final victory they had won “a victory against war itself”.

One state that had fought Germany from the very first day was missing from the list of signatories: Poland. The great powers had been unable to agree on who should represent it, so a blank space was left for its signature on the document. Poland signed only on 15 October 1945 and was counted among the 51 founding members.

From Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta to San Francisco

The idea of a new world organisation to replace the powerless League of Nations matured throughout the war. The Atlantic Charter of August 1941 looked forward to “a wider and permanent system of general security”, and the Declaration by United Nations of 1 January 1942 gave the anti-Hitler coalition the name that the future organisation was to adopt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt initially thought of it as an instrument of the “four policemen” – the United States, Britain, the USSR and China – who would keep the peace together.

A draft constitution was drawn up in the autumn of 1944 at Dumbarton Oaks, a mansion in Washington. In the first phase of the talks the Americans, British and Russians agreed on the structure of the organisation: a General Assembly of all members, a Security Council with permanent seats for the great powers, a secretariat and a court. In the second phase the draft was discussed with the Chinese, and the joint proposals were published on 9 October 1944. Two questions remained open: the voting procedure in the Security Council, and Moscow’s demand that all sixteen Union republics of the USSR become members.

Both were settled at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Joseph Stalin accepted the American voting formula: procedural decisions would be taken by a majority of seven votes, while substantive decisions would require the agreement of all the permanent members – in other words, each of them would have a veto. In return Roosevelt and Churchill promised to support the admission of two Soviet republics – the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs. It was also agreed that the founding conference would meet in San Francisco on 25 April, and that invitations would go to states that signed the Declaration by United Nations and declared war on the common enemy by 1 March 1945. This is why many neutral or passive states hastily declared war on Germany or Japan at that time.

Roosevelt himself was to host the conference. He died, however, on 12 April, less than two weeks before it opened. One of his successor’s first decisions was to keep to the date: right after Roosevelt’s death, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius announced that the conference would go ahead as planned.

The opening of the conference

The proceedings opened on 25 April 1945 in the War Memorial Opera House – on the same day that American and Soviet soldiers met on the Elbe. Forty-six states had been invited. According to the conference’s own figures, some 850 delegates attended, and with advisers and secretariat staff about 3,500 people; more than 2,500 journalists and observers reported on the proceedings. The delegations of the four sponsoring powers were led by their foreign ministers: Stettinius, Anthony Eden, Vyacheslav Molotov and China’s Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong). They took turns presiding over the plenary sessions, while Stettinius chaired the steering and executive committees. The secretary-general of the conference was the American diplomat Alger Hiss.

The work was divided among four commissions – general provisions, the General Assembly, the Security Council and judicial organisation – and twelve technical committees. The Dumbarton Oaks proposals were the starting point, but the delegates could amend them, and the smaller states tabled hundreds of amendments.

The dispute over Argentina and Poland’s empty seat

The very first days showed how fragile the unity of the wartime coalition was. Molotov demanded that the Polish government recognised by Moscow – the Provisional Government in Warsaw, which had grown out of the Lublin Committee (PKWN) – be invited to San Francisco. The United States and Britain refused: at Yalta it had been agreed that a new government would be formed in Poland, “reorganised on a broader democratic basis”, and the talks on this in Moscow had reached deadlock. The West still recognised the Polish government-in-exile in London, but had no intention of inviting it against the wishes of the USSR. In the end Poland – a signatory of the 1942 Declaration by United Nations – had no delegation at all in San Francisco.

At the same time the Latin American states set a condition: they would support the admission of Ukraine and Byelorussia if the conference admitted Argentina, which had declared war on the Axis only at the end of March. Molotov objected sharply, recalling Buenos Aires’s sympathy for the Axis powers and asking why Argentina should take a seat at the table when Poland could not. At the end of April the conference admitted both Soviet republics, and on 30 April, in a vote and over Soviet opposition, Argentina as well. On 5 June liberated Denmark was also admitted. The number of participants thus rose to 50.

The Polish question weighed on the conference in another way too. At the beginning of May Molotov informed Stettinius and Eden that sixteen leaders of the Polish Underground State, who had been invited to talks with the Russians in March, had been arrested. The British and Americans then suspended the talks on the Polish government. The defendants’ trial, known as the Trial of the Sixteen, took place in Moscow on 18–21 June, while the text of the Charter was being finalised in San Francisco. At the same time talks were under way in Moscow on forming the Provisional Government of National Unity, which was announced on 28 June, two days after the Charter was signed.

The best-remembered Polish moment of the conference was a gesture by the pianist Arthur Rubinstein. By his own account, at a concert for the delegates in the opera house he noticed that the Polish flag was missing among the flags of the founding states. Before he began to play he told the audience that in a hall where the great nations had gathered to make the world a better place, he could not see the flag of Poland, for which this war had been fought – and he played the Polish national anthem, “Dąbrowski’s Mazurka”. The audience listened to it standing.

The veto crisis

The most serious dispute concerned the scope of the veto. The Yalta formula did not make clear whether a permanent member could block the Security Council from even considering a matter. The smaller states submitted to the great powers a long list of questions about how the veto would work in practice. While a joint reply was being drafted, the Soviet delegation – led, after Molotov’s departure, by the ambassador in Washington, Andrei Gromyko – declared that the veto must also cover the decision on whether the Council would discuss a matter at all. To the Americans and British this meant that any great power could silence the Council on any matter that concerned it. By early June the conference was deadlocked, and the press was writing about the possibility of its failure.

The solution came from Moscow. At the end of May Truman had sent Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest adviser, to rescue the deteriorating relationship with Stalin – above all over Poland. During their last conversation, on 6 June, Hopkins raised the question of the veto. According to the American record, Stalin listened to Molotov, dismissed the dispute as unimportant and accepted the American position. On 7 June the four sponsoring powers issued a joint statement on voting procedure: no permanent member could block the Council from considering a matter, but substantive decisions – including those on sanctions and the use of force – required the unanimity of the great powers.

The small and middle powers against the great

The great powers’ compromise did not satisfy everyone. The loudest protests came from the Australian foreign minister, Herbert Vere Evatt, backed by the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Peter Fraser. Evatt tried to limit the veto at least in the peaceful settlement of disputes and in amendments to the Charter, but the great powers made it clear that without the veto there would be no organisation – above all, the USSR would not join it and the US Senate would not approve it. The amendments failed, and the delegates accepted the veto as the price of the great powers’ participation.

The middle and small states nevertheless won a good deal. The powers of the General Assembly were widened, and it gained the right to discuss any matter within the scope of the Charter. The Economic and Social Council, a secondary body at Dumbarton Oaks, became one of the principal organs, and a commitment to promote human rights was written into the Charter. The Latin American states, bound by the Act of Chapultepec recently signed in Mexico, secured recognition of regional arrangements and a provision on the right of self-defence. A trusteeship system for dependent territories was also created, together with a chapter on the obligations of colonial powers towards non-self-governing peoples – a subject on which China, Egypt and the Arab states had pressed hard. Only a few weeks earlier the Levant crisis had shown that colonial disputes would not disappear with the end of the war.

What the Charter contains

The Charter has 111 articles in 19 chapters. It opens with a preamble, the first draft of which was prepared by the Prime Minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…”. The purposes of the organisation are to maintain international peace and security, to develop friendly relations among nations, and to cooperate in solving economic, social and humanitarian problems.

The most important principles are set out in Article 2: the sovereign equality of members, the peaceful settlement of disputes, and the prohibition of the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other state. The exceptions are the right of individual or collective self-defence (Article 51) and action taken by the Security Council.

The Charter establishes six principal organs:

• the General Assembly, in which each state has one vote;
• the Security Council, with five permanent members (China, France, the USSR, Britain and the United States) and six non-permanent members elected for two years – the only organ whose decisions are binding on members;
• the Economic and Social Council, with 18 members;
• the Trusteeship Council;
• the International Court of Justice in The Hague, successor to the Permanent Court of International Justice of the League of Nations era; its statute forms an integral part of the Charter;
• the Secretariat, headed by the Secretary-General.

The text of the Charter also bears the marks of the war in which it was born. The so-called enemy state clauses (Articles 53 and 107) allowed the victors to take measures against the former Axis states without the consent of the Security Council. Amending the Charter required ratification by all the permanent members, which gave them a veto on this matter too. The Chinese, French, Russian, English and Spanish texts were declared equally authentic.

Adoption and signature

On 25 June the delegates met in the opera house for the final plenary session. It was chaired by the head of the British delegation, Lord Halifax, who had replaced Eden in San Francisco after Eden was called home by the election campaign. He proposed that so important a decision should be taken not by a show of hands but by rising. Every delegation stood, followed by the public in the galleries, and Halifax announced that the Charter had been adopted unanimously.

The next day, 26 June, the signing began in the auditorium of the Veterans War Memorial Building. The ceremony lasted the whole day, as each delegate signed the document separately at a round table, under floodlights and film cameras. China signed first – as the first victim of aggression by the Axis powers – with Wellington Koo putting the first signature on behalf of its delegation. The USSR, Britain and France followed, then the other states in alphabetical order, and finally the United States as host. Stettinius signed for the United States in the presence of President Truman. Together with the Charter, the delegates signed the Statute of the International Court of Justice and the Interim Arrangements, which set up a preparatory commission to function until the first UN organs convened.

“A victory against war itself”

Truman spoke at the close of the conference. He called the Charter the delegates had just signed a solid structure on which a better world could be built, and told them that history would honour them for it; between the victory in Europe and the final victory in this most destructive of all wars, he said, they had won “a victory against war itself”. He warned, however, that the document would be worth only as much as the will to use it: if they did not use it, they would betray all those who had died so that they could meet there in freedom and safety and create it. He added that if the world had had such a charter a few years earlier – and the will to use it – millions now dead would still be alive.

The mood in San Francisco was elevated, but not without misgivings. Commentators observed that the organisation’s effectiveness would depend on agreement among the great powers, and that agreement had already proved difficult during the conference itself. In the Pacific soldiers were still dying: four days earlier the Battle of Okinawa had ended, and an invasion of the Japanese home islands was being planned. A few weeks before, the Berlin Declaration had placed supreme authority in defeated Germany in the hands of the four powers – the same four which, together with China, were to sit permanently on the Security Council.

The road to entry into force

Signature did not yet bring the organisation into being. Under Article 110 the Charter would enter into force once it had been ratified by the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of the other signatories. Mindful that in 1919–1920 the Senate had rejected the Treaty of Versailles, and with it membership of the League of Nations, the Truman administration carefully cultivated the support of both parties; the American delegation included both Democratic and Republican senators. On 28 July 1945 the Senate approved the Charter by 89 votes to 2.

Poland signed the Charter on 15 October 1945, by then as a state represented by the Provisional Government of National Unity, which the Western powers had recognised at the beginning of July. The blank space left in San Francisco allowed it to be counted among the founding members – as the 51st state. The Charter entered into force on 24 October 1945, when 29 states, including all the great powers, had deposited their instruments of ratification; the day is marked as United Nations Day. The first session of the General Assembly met in London in January 1946. Stettinius, who stepped down as Secretary of State immediately after the conference in favour of James Byrnes, became the first US ambassador to the UN.

Place in the war

The Charter of the United Nations was the most important political outcome of the coalition that defeated Germany, and an attempt to learn the lessons of the League of Nations’ failure. Unlike the League, the new organisation included all the great powers from the outset, among them the United States and the USSR, and its Security Council was given the power to impose binding sanctions and to use force. The prohibition of the use of force in international relations became the foundation of post-war international law.

At the same time the Charter fixed in place the balance of power at the end of the war. The veto meant that the system of collective security could work only when the great powers agreed – and their accord, still visible in San Francisco, soon gave way to the Cold War. The fate of Poland – the first state to put up armed resistance to Germany, which nevertheless had no delegation of its own in San Francisco – showed that the shape of post-war Europe was decided not by the principles of the new organisation but by agreements and the balance of power among the victors.