Fulfilling the Sacred Trust: The UN Campaign for International Accountability for Dependent Territories in the Era of Decolonization

By Mary Ann Heiss

Fulfilling the Sacred Trust explores the implementation of international accountability for dependent territories under the United Nations during the early Cold War era. Although the Western nations that drafted the UN Charter saw the organization as a means of maintaining the international status quo they controlled, newly independent nations saw the UN as an instrument of decolonization and an agent of change disrupting global political norms. Mary Ann Heiss documents the unprecedented process through which these new nations came to wrest control of the United Nations from the World War II victors that founded it, allowing the UN to become a vehicle for global reform.

Heiss examines the consequences of these early changes on the global political landscape in the midst of heightened international tensions playing out in Europe, the developing world, and the UN General Assembly. She puts this anti-colonial advocacy for accountability into perspective by making connections between the campaign for international accountability in the United Nations and other postwar international reform efforts such as the anti-apartheid movement, Pan-Africanism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the drive for global human rights.

Chronicling the combative history of this campaign, Fulfilling the Sacred Trust details the global impact of the larger UN reformist effort. Heiss demonstrates the unintended impact of decolonization on the United Nations and its agenda, as well as the shift in global influence from the developed to the developing world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501752711

Book preview

FULFILLING THE SACRED TRUST

THE UN CAMPAIGN FOR INTERNATIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY FOR DEPENDENT TERRITORIES IN THE ERA OF DECOLONIZATION

MARY ANN HEISS

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For CEW

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Laying the Groundwork

2. Fits and Starts

3. Organizational Foundations

4. Rhetoric and Routine

5. Taking Off the Gloves

6. Power Shifts

7. Crossing the Rubicon

8. Activism Triumphant

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Toward International Accountability for All Dependent Territories

When the United Nations was founded in 1945, dozens of states lacked independent nationhood and were thus ineligible to join. Together, they were home to 750 million people, almost a third of the world’s total population. The UN Charter prescribed two different approaches to such dependent territories. A far-reaching Trusteeship System governed the colonies of the nations that had lost the First and Second World Wars. Anchored by the powerful Trusteeship Council, that system held administering trustees accountable for conditions in the territories under their supervision and explicitly sought to bring those territories to independence.¹ Only a vague system of reporting, however, covered the colonies of the victorious Allies. Terming these two groups non-self-governing territories and administering states, respectively, Chapter XI of the Charter protected the interests of the latter and did not set independence as a goal.² Given the administering states’ dominant role in drafting the Charter, this should not have been surprising.

By 1963, only a handful of dependent territories remained. Most of the trust territories had peacefully achieved some form of independence.³ The course for the non-self-governing territories was rockier. While some gained independence relatively peacefully, others did so only through war. The literature on decolonization—the process by which formerly dependent territories secured their independence—generally focuses on either those struggles or the colonial powers’ reactions to them.⁴ As valuable as these studies are, they tell us only half the decolonization story. The other half occurred at the United Nations, where an ever-growing group of anticolonial activists pushed the organization toward a role in the non-self-governing territories, which extended well beyond the limits of the Charter and amounted, in the words of David A. Kay, to institutionalized international accountability.⁵

The UN accountability system developed gradually. The First General Assembly took the initial step when it established a committee to examine the information the administering states were to transmit under the terms of Chapter XI of the Charter. Those states were able to limit the reach of what ultimately came to be known as the Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories by insisting that its membership be equally balanced between administering and nonadministering states even though such a configuration did not reflect the organization’s overall makeup. They also ensured that the committee never acquired the sort of powers that were vested in the Trusteeship Council. So while its discussions over the years often included harsh anticolonial rhetoric and proposals for greater international accountability for dependent territories, its tangible accomplishments were meager.⁶ And the ability of the Western states to control the General Assembly through the mid-1950s prevented more robust action toward international accountability in other UN forums.⁷

After 1955, though, the great powers’ hold over the United Nations began to erode as formerly dependent territories used the membership that inhered in their independent nationhood to push the organization toward activism on issues that were important to them.⁸ International accountability for non-self-governing territories was one of those issues. India was a leading force in this effort from the start. Other states joined it as they achieved independence.⁹ By 1960, they attained the ability not only to shape the General Assembly’s agenda but also to determine its leadership. In February 1960, Ghana’s Alex Quaison-Sackey was elected chair of the Committee on Information, just three years after his nation had ceased to be a subject of its consideration. (In 1964, he became the Assembly’s first black African president.) Sixteen months later, Burma’s U Thant became the third UN secretary-general and the first non-European to hold the position, a testament to the growing power of the Asian, African, and Latin American member-states within the organization.

The same changes in the United Nations’ makeup that allowed for the ascension of Quaison-Sackey and Thant also made the establishment of meaningful accountability for dependent territories possible. Admission of seventeen former dependent territories in 1960 permanently shifted the balance in the General Assembly and guaranteed the developing states’ ability to set the organization’s future course. Not surprisingly, international accountability was one of their highest priorities. In December 1961, forty-three Asian and African nations pushed for approval of Resolution 1514 (XV), the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which condemned colonialism in all its forms and manifestations and declared that all peoples have the right to self-determination. A year later, thirty-eight of those states co-sponsored Resolution 1654 (XVI), which created a powerful entity, the Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, to put the declaration into practice. The final step in the drive for international accountability came in 1963, when the Assembly dissolved the Committee on Information and vested all UN authority for dealing with nontrust dependent territories in what was known informally as the Decolonization Committee. This move established essentially parallel institutions to deal with the remaining dependent territories and initiated a new chapter in the UN role in facilitating decolonization.¹⁰

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Fulfilling the Sacred Trust considers the drive to attain international accountability for dependent territories against a variety of contemporary contexts and should be seen as a complement to more geographically focused accounts of decolonization. One of its strands traces the intricacies of the accountability campaign itself, dissecting its key elements, justification, progress, and ultimate triumph. At heart, that campaign sought to extend to the United Nations the same sorts of powers regarding the non-self-governing territories as applied to the trust territories: the authority to determine both when a particular territory was non-self-governing and when it ceased to be so; requiring the administering states to transmit full information about political as well as economic, social, and educational progress; and the right of the United Nations to receive petitions and hear petitioners from the non-self-governing territories and to send official delegations to them. To ensure that these conduits for administering state accountability were in fact being used, activists also sought repeatedly—and ultimately successfully—to redress the weaknesses of the Committee on Information.

The pitched battles that the campaign for international accountability for dependent territories engendered between the administering states and their allies, on one side, and the increasingly vocal and numerically expanding anticolonial UN majority, on the other, constitute a second strand interwoven throughout the following chapters. The victors in the Second World War that drafted the UN Charter saw the organization as a vehicle for protecting their own national interests, interests that included far-flung empires. To them, drafting the Charter in ways that limited the UN role in the nontrust dependent territories and falling back on that narrow conception when faced with challenges from the anticolonial faction in the General Assembly therefore made perfect sense. Anticolonialists at the United Nations, of course, saw things differently. For them, denying the peoples of the nontrust dependent territories international supervision simply because the states that administered them had won the war was wrong. Achieving international accountability thus became a moral imperative to rectify the injustice perpetrated at San Francisco and demonstrate to the non-self-governing territories that the world cared no less about them and their progress toward independence than it did about the territories placed under the Trusteeship System.

Although the drive for international accountability for dependent territories was centered at the United Nations, a variety of outside trends and developments came together to shape its outcome; together, they comprise a third strand woven throughout the chapters to come. One of those international developments was the Cold War, which pitted the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites against the US-led Free World and played out economically, politically, and militarily throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. It also made its way into the United Nations, where each side sought to use the organization as a platform for criticizing the other. Colonial questions at the United Nations, and specifically efforts to achieve international accountability, thus became a Cold War battle ground, with the Soviet bloc using the existence of colonialism and the lack of real UN power to end it as a way of discrediting the West and currying favor with the developing world, where support for accountability was deepest. US efforts to use Moscow’s domination of Central Asia, the Baltic states, and even Eastern Europe as evidence that the Soviet Union was itself an imperialist power largely fell flat. Instead, more often than not—and most notably after the Soviets led the charge in 1960 for a larger UN role in the nontrust dependent territories—the Soviet bloc found common cause with the states of Asia and Africa, although that alliance did not mean that the Asian and African member-states accepted Soviet leadership. On the contrary, as the chapters to come make clear, it was the Soviets who often fell in line after the Asians and Africans.¹¹

Additional international context for the campaign to develop a system of international accountability for nontrust dependent territories, as has already been suggested, came from the process of decolonization. In 1946, eight administering states admitted responsibility for seventy-two nontrust dependent territories and pledged to transmit information on them in conformity with Article 73(e) of the UN Charter.¹² By 1959, eight of those states had attained independent nationhood and joined the United Nations: Indonesia (1950); Cambodia and Laos (1955); Morocco and Tunisia (1956); Ghana and the Federation of Malaya (1957); and Guinea (1958). Between 1960 and 1963, the trickle of independence became a torrent, with two dozen former non-self-governing territories and another seven trust territories becoming UN member-states. By the conclusion of the Eighteenth General Assembly, former trust and nontrust dependent territories constituted 38 of the organization’s 113 members or just over one-third of its membership—enough to block so-called important questions and thus exert considerable sway over the General Assembly.¹³ More than merely the ability to block measures they opposed, however, what the new nations also gained was the ability to move the UN agenda away from Cold War geopolitical concerns and the East-West divide and toward the social, economic, and human rights issues that the nascent Non-Aligned Movement came to champion after its founding in 1961. These issues included the call for international accountability for dependent territories.

Administering-state opposition to international accountability was axiomatic. France and Belgium consistently challenged growing UN activism vis-à-vis their territories and at different times refused to participate in the work of the Committee on Information.¹⁴ Portugal resisted even more strenuously after joining the United Nations in 1955; its refusal to admit that it administered any non-self-governing territories, in fact, threw the organization into turmoil.¹⁵ Rather than considering these militant states, however, this book focuses on how the two most prominent Western nations, the United States and Great Britain, dealt with the push for accountability.

As an administering power under Chapter XI of the Charter, the United States initially reported on Alaska, Hawaii, the Panama Canal Zone, and Puerto Rico. While neither the biggest nor the most notorious colonial administrator, it was by far the most powerful. From the start, Washington adopted a flexible approach to UN interest in the territories it administered and encouraged its allies to do likewise. It resisted wholesale accountability, however, at least until that stance was no longer tenable. In a bid to play honest broker at the United Nations, the administrations of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy all proclaimed their desire to pursue a middle-of-the-road approach that favored neither side in the evolving battle over mandated accountability for dependent territories. In practice, however, the United States routinely sided with the Western European colonial powers.

The US position as leader of the Free World explains why. As the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and its satellites made territory and resources increasingly vital, US officials were loath to lose access to either. As a result, the United States undertook a variety of economic, political, and military measures—some overt, some covert—designed to prevent the expansion of Communist influence and maximize the number of states aligned with the Western camp. The literature has covered those various initiatives well, and they are not outlined in detail in the chapters that follow. They do, however, make their way into the discussion at times as context for the US stance at the United Nations on colonial questions in general and accountability specifically, where they explain both the lengths to which the United States was prepared to go to meet perceived challenges and the deleterious—if unintended—consequences of the nation’s Cold War–motivated foreign policy on its relations with the developing world.

If geopolitical concerns shaped the US stance on international accountability for dependent territories, the British position was rooted in the nation’s status as the world’s leading colonial administrator. Support for decolonization of the more than three dozen territories on which Britain transmitted information in conformity with Article 73(e) of the Charter was slow to gain traction, particularly following the return of Conservative Party rule in October 1951.¹⁶ Two of these territories, Ghana and Malaya, joined the United Nations as independent states in 1957 and immediately lent their voices to the anticolonial cause, including the accountability campaign; nine other former British colonies secured admission between 1960 and 1963. That meant that Britain still administered more than two dozen non-self-governing territories when the accountability campaign outlined in this book concluded; the bulk of those territories had attained independence by 1968.¹⁷

Britain’s approach to UN activism in the nontrust dependent territories sought to protect its national prerogatives while also recognizing limited international interest. To that end, British officials moved from legal arguments rooted in the Charter through a fervent defense of the nation’s colonial record (and concomitant criticism of Soviet colonialism), to eventual acceptance of a modest UN interest, and finally to active resistance when that interest challenged what they saw as their colonial authority. Differences between the Foreign Office, responsible for the whole of the nation’s foreign relations, and the more narrowly focused Colonial and Dominions Offices complicated British policy toward international accountability. Although the latter dominated for a time, once the activist element gained control of the General Assembly, all segments of the British government had to admit that resistance to accountability was futile.¹⁸

As the chapters that follow make clear, proponents of international accountability had the upper hand in virtually all respects. They certainly had numerical superiority, particularly after 1960. They also had the better argument, framing their cause as a moral struggle based on equal treatment in a way that proved much more appealing than the administering states’ self-interested foot-dragging. And they had the march of history on their side, as the late 1950s and early 1960s saw a rising consciousness of the need to redress inequities in the global environment. Differences in the way the Charter treated the trust and nontrust territories—and by extension, the people who populated them—thus became one part of a larger movement that the administering states and their dwindling number of allies could not hope to forestall.

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Fulfilling the Sacred Trust builds on and moves beyond the available scholarship on a variety of topics, among them the United Nations and internationalism in general. Existing studies that touch on questions of UN accountability are limited in scope and context.¹⁹ Deeper treatment of that concept can be found in the literature on the League of Nations, with Susan Pedersen’s The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire making the best case for the importance of the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission as an early reflection of that avenue of thinking. In fact, that volume, while not providing direct parallel coverage to this book, serves as something of a prelude for it, as in many ways the campaign for international accountability chronicled here owed its origins to the narrower sense of internationalism that prevailed during the interwar period.²⁰

Yet whereas the League’s Mandate System was never intended to do more than give flight to the idea of international interest in the dependent territories that fell under its auspices, proponents of postwar international accountability sought openly to achieve universal independence.²¹ Although that outcome was the explicitly stated goal of the Trusteeship System and the milestone Resolution 1514 (XV), Chapter XI of the Charter mentions only self-government. Achieving international accountability, therefore, was a way to extend the goal of independence to all dependent territories. Exploring the course and ultimate success of the effort to implement accountability for dependent territories demonstrates the extent to which the idea of internationalism had spread by the postwar period and the degree to which the new nations at the United Nations were able to achieve their aims.²² It also complements other studies of decolonization at the United Nations that have started filling the historiographical gap in that area, which Wm. Roger Louis noted in 2006.²³

This study also adds layers to the historiography of broader postwar international activism by considering the campaign for accountability against other contemporaneous movements to bring the voices and concerns of the underdeveloped world to the fore. One was the drive for Pan-Africanism. Following the independence of Ghana in 1957 and the march of decolonization across Africa, the independent states of the continent increasingly united to champion independence for the remaining dependent territories, expanded economic development assistance, and an end to state-sanctioned racial discrimination. The April 1958 Conference of Independent African States in Accra, Ghana, brought eight states together; a second gathering in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in June 1960 drew thirteen. In the wake of the major wave of decolonization in the early 1960s, thirty-two nations came together in 1963, again in Addis Ababa, to found the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The discussions, final memoranda, and resolutions of these early gatherings and the founding documents of the OAU, which demonstrated an emerging African personality in international affairs, were strongly anticolonial; they also roundly denounced South Africa’s racially discriminatory apartheid policy.²⁴ At the United Nations, as Jeffrey James Byrne has argued in another context, the new African nations used the membership in the organization that their own nation-state status conferred to present the case for decolonization on behalf of non-self-governing peoples who otherwise had no voice, exhorting the United Nations to expand its involvement in the nontrust dependent territories and bring new nations to life—and into the organization.²⁵

Another international activist effort that related to the campaign for accountability for dependent territories was the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Founded in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961, the NAM built on the 1955 Bandung Conference in pursuing decolonization, development, and nuclear disarmament. The twenty-five Asian, African, and Latin American nations in attendance at the Belgrade Conference eschewed the Cold War and promoted their collective identity as inhabitants of the Global South. Believing fervently in the United Nations’ ability to address their concerns, they worked concertedly to push the organization to ease Cold War tensions and achieve nuclear disarmament as well as to eliminate disparities between the developed North and underdeveloped South.²⁶

The same was true of activists who linked the process of decolonization with the broad concept of human rights, and specifically with the universality of the right to self-determination and national independence. Failure of either the UN Charter or the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) to elevate self-determination to a right was a bitter pill for anticolonial activists, who sought throughout the period addressed in this book to push the United Nations to rectify that omission by moving beyond the individual rights enumerated in the UDHR toward a more collectivist conception that emphasized the rights of groups or states, including the right to self-determination. Jumpstarting work on the human rights covenants, which were intended to give teeth to the simple enumeration of individual rights contained in the declaration, was one element of this reformist effort. Another was moving the General Assembly beyond the Charter’s recognition of self-determination as a principle to declaring it an unassailable, universal right, which was ultimately achieved in Resolution 1514 (XV).²⁷

Although all of these activist campaigns condemned South Africa’s racist apartheid policy, the discrete drive to eliminate it is also considered independently here.²⁸ Evolving after 1948 to mandate the total segregation of every aspect of national life, apartheid generated immediate domestic opposition but only gradual international attention.²⁹ World opposition to apartheid accelerated in the so-called Year of Africa, 1960, when the combined effects of the decolonization-induced growth in the United Nations and the brutal Sharpeville Massacre against unarmed protestors brought the situation in South Africa not only into the words of the members of the United Nations but also onto the organization’s agenda. Citing the Charter’s domestic jurisdiction clause, South Africa vigorously rejected various resolutions over the years condemning apartheid. Calls for actual sanctions had more success, but ran headlong into Western state reluctance to go against an important Cold War ally. Nevertheless, South Africa became increasingly isolated, withdrawing from the work of some of the organization’s specialized agencies and often failing to attend Assembly sessions entirely. Although the details of the long, and ultimately successful, drive to end apartheid do not figure directly in this book, the anti-apartheid campaign must be noted here as one piece of the larger international drive for equality and evidence of the power of global outrage.³⁰

Taken together, these movements expressed a deep sense of moral indignation at the inequalities of the postwar world and constituted an effort to work across national boundaries—and especially through the United Nations—to eliminate them.³¹ As the chapters that follow reveal, the campaign for international accountability for dependent territories was part of that larger effort, too, and it painted the peoples of the territories that the nation-centric system of administration embodied in Chapter XI covered as worse off than those who fell under UN supervision via the Trusteeship System. They could not directly present their grievances to the organization. Nor could they submit written petitions or look to UN site visits to expose the conditions under which they lived to the General Assembly and larger world. Ensuring such practices was the purpose of the push for accountability, which proponents came to portray in terms of human rights, social justice, and moral decency, avenging the subordination at San Francisco of the rights of individuals to the rights of states and designating self-determination an incontrovertible, universal human right.³² By 1960, in fact, they came to see international supervision by the United Nations in service of independence as preferable to national supervision by a colonial metropole and gradual progress toward that end. The idea that self-determination should be effected at all costs made accountability a radical, even revolutionary, proposition, as its proponents sought to replace centuries of metropole control of dependent territories with a system of global involvement and responsibility dedicated to universal self-government and independent statehood.

By contrast, the US and British responses to the campaign for international accountability for dependent territories were decidedly conservative. Both were rooted in those nations’ postwar self-conceptions. The United States was arguably the driving force behind creation of the United Nations, and a rich body of scholarship has explored how US officials sought to use the organization to serve the nation’s foreign policy goals. Patrick J. Hearden’s comprehensive examination of all aspects of wartime planning emphasizes US hopes that the organization would prevent another global conflict.³³ For Stephen Wertheim, the organization, and particularly its universalism, was a way to make US global ambitions palatable to both the US public and the wider world. His detailed and insightful analysis of US wartime planning breaks new historiographical ground, particularly when it comes to the importance of selling the nation’s postwar world leadership to domestic audiences.³⁴ Mark Mazower offers a similar appraisal, but in a broader context that places US international designs in conversation with those of the other great powers. Covering more chronological ground than Wertheim, he emphasizes the realism that characterized US thinking about the United Nations, much to the consternation of reformers and idealists.³⁵ Those reformers figure prominently in other accounts of the US role in the United Nations’ founding. G. John Ikenberry, for example, underscores the progressive values that lay at the heart of the US vision for the United Nations, while Elizabeth Borgwardt focuses specifically on how the new organization could support broad human rights goals. As both make clear, however, a variety of developments compromised early idealism about the United Nations’ potential.³⁶

As Cold War divisions rent the United Nations apart and dashed hope that it would speak with one voice regarding international issues, US officials came to see the organization’s potential as a propaganda platform for putting their global vision to the rest of the world.³⁷ Their message sought to contrast life in the nations of the US-led Western alliance with conditions in the Soviet-led Communist bloc, always to the latter’s detriment.³⁸ Foundational US Cold War documents, from the very public Truman Doctrine to the top-secret NSC-68, made this sort of case.³⁹ So did the public propaganda of the Voice of America, the United States Information Agency (USIA), and other entities that sought to sell the United States to the world.⁴⁰ US officials also made Cold War–oriented propaganda arguments as part of the UN debate over international accountability for dependent territories, particularly after 1953, when they began a campaign designed to expose the evils of communism and highlight the virtues of Western liberal capitalism. The overriding importance of the Cold War for the US approach to the drive for accountability for dependent territories, however, should not obscure the pockets of opposition to that approach that periodically appeared within US policymaking circles, most prominently among personnel in the State Department’s Bureau of International Organizations and other specialized units, as well as within the US delegation to the United Nations. For these officials, the nation’s containment-framed position on international accountability for dependent territories was hidebound and retrograde, tying Washington to out-of-touch allies and poisoning its relationship with the states of the developing world. Events would ultimately prove them right.⁴¹

British resistance to international accountability, which was consistent from the Labour government of Clement Attlee through the Conservative governments of Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Alec Douglas-Home, rested on a traditional, often defensive, foundation. At times, British officials legalistically fell back on the Charter to explain why they could not accept greater UN activism in the nontrust dependent territories. And like US officials, they at times spoke out aggressively against Soviet imperialism in Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, and Central Asia. But by far the biggest element of their effort to resist accountability sought to dispel misconceptions and downright falsehoods about Britain’s imperial record and marshal concrete evidence to demonstrate the salutary effects of their colonial administration.⁴² In other words, what Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher called the British official mind sought to sell the inherent goodness of the empire, including its transitory nature, to the United Nations as a way of defusing criticism of British policy and preventing international involvement in colonial affairs.⁴³

This book considers the British pushback against international accountability for dependent territories as a form of imperial propaganda, designed to defend the nation’s record as a colonial administrator and, while not preserving its traditional role in the colonies, at least guarantee that former colonies would remain solid trading partners, potential allies, and loyal members of the Commonwealth. Admitting a UN right of supervision could drive Britain’s former colonies in another direction and therefore had to be resisted. In thus seeking to preserve the nation’s economic if not political relationships with former colonies, British officials were pursuing a conservative policy that put the interests of the metropole ahead of those of the developing periphery. They were also increasingly placing themselves at odds with prevailing international sentiment—and, ultimately, a significant segment of the British population as well.⁴⁴

The book also explores how the dozens of new nations that joined the United Nations after the mid-1950s and particularly in and after the pivotal year of 1960—a move that John Karefa-Smart has deemed as important in signifying national independence as a new flag and a national anthem—used the platform the organization afforded them to further their national and collective agendas.⁴⁵ This was especially the case after East-West tensions paralyzed the Security Council and gave the General Assembly, where all UN member-states had the same status, an importance far beyond its original intent. In the Assembly, the new nations could go toe to toe with the great powers, including their former colonial rulers, on an equal footing.⁴⁶ It was there that they and their allies made the case for international accountability. Beginning in 1955, the Asian and African delegations coordinated their work at the United Nations in order to maximize their impact; from 1958 on, African states did the same. The ever-larger margins that approved the many resolutions that chipped away at the two-pronged system for managing the dependent territories reflected over time the growth of anticolonial sentiment and support for the idea of true international responsibility for dependent territories far beyond merely the Asian and African delegations. And the ultimate success of the campaign for accountability, as well as growing UN interest in such issues as economic development, racial equality, and human rights, revealed how much the process of decolonization shaped the organization’s agenda after 1960. In this way, the major role that the Asian and African group played in securing international accountability for dependent territories confirms David A. Kay’s assertion that the United Nations was more an arena than an actor on the international scene. It was what its majority powers made it, and by 1963 the majority of states had turned the organization into an agent of decolonization.⁴⁷

The official records of the United Nations, available in microfiche form at UN repository libraries throughout the world, provide complete coverage of the drive for accountability in committee and General Assembly debates, as well as written communications from delegates and papers and reports prepared by the Secretariat. Those documents make clear how weighty the issue was for all sides—and how much import it assumed in particular for the former dependent territories that gained UN membership in and after 1960. Votes, at both the committee and General Assembly level, also provide important windows into the growing appeal of international accountability, as the entry of new, anticolonial states tipped the voting balance from the organization’s Western founders to the states of the developing world. Finally, a multitude of draft and approved resolutions reveals the depth of feeling and commitment to cause that impelled the growing cadre of activists forward. Because UN resolutions carry no enforcement provisions, they are often dismissed as unimportant, particularly by those who prize action and tangible, measurable results. That perspective misses the important role those resolutions play in conveying the collective sense of the world on a given issue at a given time. As Amy L. Sayward has argued, they constitute a form of soft power that should not be ignored.⁴⁸ The many resolutions related to international accountability for dependent territories prove that point, revealing growing global outrage at the injustice of the two-track approach to dependent territories that the administering states simply could not resist.

Ultimately, the campaign for international accountability can be seen, most broadly, as the clash of two different conceptions of what the United Nations should be. Opponents of accountability, which included the very Western powers that had drafted the UN Charter, hewed unalterably to a vision of the organization as designed primarily to protect a world they already dominated. For them, preserving peace was the organization’s number one purpose, and it was in no way to infringe on their rights as colonial powers. They pushed for—and secured—a Charter that privileged the rights of states over the rights of individuals and a General Assembly that lacked real power. Proponents of accountability took antithetical positions on every score. Seeing the United Nations as a vehicle for global reform on behalf of the weak and powerless, they subordinated the elitist, great-power-dominated Security Council to the egalitarian General Assembly and advocated relentlessly for the rights of individuals over the rights of states. Proponents of international accountability were revolutionaries on a number of levels. They sought not only to overthrow the existing nation-centered system for colonial administration but also to facilitate the transfer of power in the non-self-governing territories from administering metropoles to the indigenous residents. These changes would reshape the United Nations in the process. The very fact that dozens of new nations secured independence and membership in the United Nations meant that the world that prevailed when the Charter was drafted was not immutable. If the United States, Great Britain, and the other administering states could not deny the reality of decolonization, they nevertheless waged a concerted—but ultimately futile—campaign to limit its effects by preserving their national prerogatives in the dependent territories under their control and their domination of the organization they had created. In this way, those states resembled what classical realism dubs status quo powers, stubbornly clinging to what the proponents of international accountability for dependent territories considered discredited and reactionary positions even as the world changed around them.⁴⁹

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The eight chapters of Fulfilling the Sacred Trust provide a chronological account of the campaign for international responsibility for non-self-governing territories. Chapter 1 takes the concept of internationalism back to World War I and the League of Nations Mandate System, which undertook the first, albeit limited, effort to legitimize global organizational involvement in dependent territories, and carries it through World War II and the San Francisco Conference. The Anglo-American discord that marked wartime discussion of international involvement in colonial matters, which was fueled by British refusal to be held accountable for the empire, hints at the periodic transatlantic disagreement that surfaced in the years to come. US capitulation to the British position also reveals a tendency to lean toward the Western European allies when it came to the idea of international involvement in colonial questions. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the First General Assembly’s handling of the nontrust dependent territories, including its initial steps beyond the narrow confines of the Charter. The small victories that the proponents of a real UN role in the nontrust dependent territories achieved in 1946 were a long way from true international accountability, but they were an important start down that road and an indication of things to come.

Taken together, chapters 2, 3, and 4 analyze the first phase of the drive for accountability and correspond roughly to the period of Western domination of the United Nations. The international reformist efforts that complemented that drive had not yet gained much steam, so much of the story covered in these chapters is UN-focused. Chapter 2 deals with the three one-year terms (1947–1949) of the Committee of Information (although it actually operated under a series of other names for this period). A variety of proposals for accountability was introduced during these years, but solid Western state domination of the General Assembly, as well as those states’ manipulation of UN procedure, prevented much of substance from being accomplished. The importance of the Cold War in shaping discussion of the UN role in the nontrust dependent territories is clear even in this early period, as the Soviet bloc worked to use colonialism as a propaganda weapon against the West across UN forums, but with little direct US response. The third chapter details the first three-year term (1950–1952) of what finally came to be called the Committee on Information in 1951. As this chapter makes clear, activists were already bypassing that ineffectual body and making their case in the Fourth Committee, where their numerical superiority afforded them power that they could not achieve on the balanced Committee on Information. Although the General Assembly had approved a number of measures for accountability by the end of 1952, their recommendatory nature allowed the administering states to ignore them without penalty. The Committee on Information’s second three-year term (1953–1955) marks the temporal parameters of chapter 4. A new presidential administration in Washington coincided with the start of this period, signaling stronger—yet largely ineffective—US anti-Soviet rhetoric at the United Nations and a more overt effort to use the organization for propaganda purposes. The Cold War’s expansion beyond Europe and the first expression of developing world consciousness in the Bandung Conference brought colonial questions at the United Nations generally, and the accountability campaign specifically, to the forefront. So did the initial stirrings of other reformist campaigns and the admission at the very end of this period of sixteen new UN member-states, a development that laid the groundwork for a dramatic expansion in the UN role in the nontrust dependent territories.

Chapters 5 and 6 address the second phase of the campaign for international accountability for dependent territories. They cover, respectively, the third term (1956–1958) and the first two years (1959–60) of the fourth term of the Committee on Information, years during which power at the United Nations shifted significantly. As chapter 5 demonstrates, the issue of UN authority to determine a particular territory’s status dominated the committee’s third term, occasioned by the claim of new member-states Portugal and Spain that they were not administering powers under the terms of the Charter. Repeated efforts through 1958 to empower the United Nations to pronounce such claims false and declare specific territories non-self-governing fell victim to the Western states’ ability to manipulate procedure. The outrage sparked especially by Portugal’s stance, however, boded ill for the long-term success of such efforts, particularly given the growth in the United Nations’ anticolonial membership, which began in earnest during the years this chapter covers and continued on well past them. By the end of the period covered in chapter 6, that growth had resulted in anticolonial control of the General Assembly, and with it approval of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which put the United Nations in the decolonization business. At the same time, the anticolonial element sought to neutralize the role of the East-West conflict in matters related to decolonization, thus thwarting Soviet efforts to claim control of the accountability campaign and generally rejecting the US campaign against Soviet colonialism. In this way, as the chapter makes clear, the developing world was beginning to wrest control of the United Nations from the Western states that had founded it and to set