The peacemakers of WWII: the diplomats who designed the postwar order
The military heroes of the Second World War appear in textbooks — Eisenhower, Patton, Montgomery, Zhukov. But the stories of the diplomats who translated the war's military outcomes into a meaningful international order are less well known. Former British diplomat Lord Peter Ricketts' new podcast focuses on the 'peacemakers of WW2'.
The years 1944-45 were a period of unprecedented intensity in global diplomatic history. Three major conferences — Tehran (1943), Yalta (1945) and Potsdam (1945) — redrew the postwar map of Europe and Asia. The diplomats who set the agendas for these conferences, prepared the ground for negotiations and implemented the outcomes laid the foundations of the modern world.
Four figures stand out from either side of the Atlantic. Sumner Welles, from the US State Department; Hugh Dalton, the British Treasury minister; Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary; and Andrei Gromyko, the rising star of Soviet diplomacy. These four were core members of the group that designed the postwar institutional architecture.
The background to the founding of the United Nations is particularly interesting. Welles and Eden, knowing that the US Senate had refused to join the League of Nations in 1919, understood that the new organisation had to be designed in a way that the US would find acceptable. That pragmatic understanding led to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council holding a veto right.
The 1944 Bretton Woods Conference shaped the postwar economic order. Negotiations between John Maynard Keynes (Britain) and Harry Dexter White (US) have been a favourite topic of academic financial historians for 25 years. Keynes proposed an 'International Clearing Union' under which the US would shoulder half of global balance of payments; White insisted on a more conventional gold-linked system.
In the end, Keynes's radical vision was diluted, but the foundations of the IMF and the World Bank were laid. The Bretton Woods system provided the framework for global financial stability until 1971; thereafter a period of freely floating rates began. The IMF and the World Bank, however, continue to operate to this day.
NATO's founding came later, in 1949. But the underlying diplomatic work was done in 1947-48. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin convinced the United States of a mutual defence link to counter Soviet influence in Europe. In return, European states accepted the Marshall Plan — economic support in exchange for strategic commitment.
The Yalta Conference brought the most contested questions about postwar Europe to the table. Stalin wanted Poland's borders pushed westward, from the Soviet frontier to the Curzon Line in the west. Churchill and Roosevelt accepted most of Stalin's demands on Poland. That was part of a set of decisions that brought Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence after the war.
Historian Lord Ricketts says in the podcast: 'The peacemakers of 1945 were not perfect. They played a role in sealing the fate of Eastern Europe at Yalta; that led to 45 years of Communist pressure. But the UN, the Bretton Woods institutions and the later NATO framework supported a period of peace at a global scale unprecedented in modern history.'
Today the institutional structure of 1944-45 is under pressure. UN Security Council reforms have been debated for decades; the global legitimacy of the IMF and the World Bank is being questioned by emerging economies; NATO is redefining its post-Cold War purpose. That shows both the resilience of the WW2 peacemakers' legacy and that it requires constant renegotiation.