Introduction

The idea for this book came to me while teaching a graduate course on the United Nations (UN). I had to recommend an introductory text that took the UN story further back than the doomed League of Nations. I could not find one. Paul Kennedy, in the most popular of these histories, The Parliament of Man: The Past Present and Future of the United Nations , spends just two paragraphs in his first chapter going through some of that prehistory. Kennedy dismisses the efforts of the Greek city-states to confederate and the various Enlightenment proposals to propose bodies that would settle disputes as “devices to chain national egoism.” Mazower, in his book No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, looks to the ways Britain, suffering from its diminished world role in the wake of the enormous economic cost of the Second World War, and America that was ever eager to take its place in the world as the up-and-coming superpower, sought to establish a new Anglophone-controlled world order.