| The problem of war has become fateful for the survival of civilization. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, when first the League of Nations failed to keep the peace and then the world was engulfed in the Second World War, scattered individuals in Europe and the United States organized a political movement to propose that the defects of a league of sovereign states be remedied by establishing a constitutionally limited, federal world government. After use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the atomic scientists' organizations proposed the international control of atomic energy, which implied limitations on national sovereignty. In mid-1946 the United States introduced a plan in the United Nations for such international control, known as the Baruch Plan. Grenville Clark, a prominent associate of Henry Stimson, called this plan an "entering wedge for world government."; A vote on the plan called at the end of 1946 failed of unanimous agreement. Within months the Cold War, even by that name, was palpably under way. Through the late 1940s, the world government movement, especially the American United World Federalists (organized in 1947), reached the height of their activities on state and national levels, but their influence was gone. The Korean War was the final blow to hopes for a peaceful East-West agreement.; The thesis of this history is that the political opportunity for establishing limited world government, which apparently existed from about the time of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1944 to the crucial vote on the Baruch Plan in 1946, was missed, resulting in a continuation of power politics and the logically alternative course of history called by 1947 the Cold War.; The work is a narrative history, based on organizational files, letters, printed statements, journals, newspapers, reminiscences, and books from all wings of the world government movement. A history of the whole movement through its origin and opportunity has never before been written.; The movement failed to prevail against nationalist developments of the containment policy in the West and the defense policy in the East. Nevertheless, the basic idea offers guidance for the future. |
