The United Nations (UN) Brief Historical Precedent

"The lights went out all over Europe," said Edward Gray, Britain's foreign secretary, watching Whitehall's lights the night Britain and Germany went to war." (HOBSBAWM, 2014, p. 30)

In history, there had been no world wars at all. This changed in 1914 as the First World War emerged. This conflict involved virtually every continent; As well as all the great powers of Europe, with the exception of 6 countries (Spain, the Netherlands, the 3 Scandinavians and Switzerland). Humanity survived, but the banner of civilization collapsed. Eric Hobsbawm wrote, "the victorious powers desperately sought the kind of peace agreement that would make another war like that which had just devastated the world impossible and whose delayed effects were everywhere." In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed.

The prelude to the attempt of what later came to be the United Nations, or the melancholy trajectory of the first international society in the figure of the (League of Nations), negotiated at the Peace Conference in Paris (January 1919), and put into operation Officially on January 10, 1920, was not empty until the remaining power of the First World War, the largest industrial producer and creditor in the world between 1920 and 1924 (USA), did not ratify the treaty and, consequently, Outside the organization.

The League of Nations - and its purpose of providing a collective international security spectrum - failed, but left a legacy as it was the first planetary attempt to regulate international life in a stable and institutional manner. The world seen under the democratic approach was no longer Eurocentric. With the overthrow of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German democratic reconversion, as well as the emergence of new democracies: Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland, Baltic States, Finlance, Czechoslovakia and affirmation of others (USA); The post-war geopolitics represented unprecedented structural changes.

In fact, the decade following the creation of the league saw high inflation and strong protectionism. These facts led to the "deterioration of the terms of trade with the devaluation of primary products" and favored "the emergence of authoritarian governments." Any small chance of peace was prevented by the refusal of the victorious powers to reintegrate the defeated. Then came the Great Depression (1929). And, twenty years ago from the first and largest armed conflict ever seen (1914-1918), the world returned to war (1939-1945).
In fact, the peace that followed the Second World War had another clothe, and important differences of that fleeting harmony with which the League of its time represented. This time they were counting - in addition to the learning obtained with the previous failure of the League of Nations - with the United States, as the remaining world superpower and host country of the San Francisco Conference, the place where the Charter of the United Nations was signed. To the United Nations (UN).