The Role of Transnational Network in Establishing the UN System: Examination of Wartime Food Collaboration

Abstract

The United Nations (UN) system has many functional agencies, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization (WHO), in contrast to the League of Nations, which only had about 10 technical agencies. Why does the UN system have so many functional agencies? This is partly owing to the Allies’ functional cooperation during the Second World War. By focusing on the interactions among the related actors, this article clarifies how food cooperation among the Allies was conducted, examines how that cooperation was influenced by the League’s food programme, and identifies its impact on the creation of the UN system.

Examining the UN creation process by focusing on food cooperation leads us to the identification of two features of the UN system. The first is that the UN system was not necessarily the outcome of easy belief in international cooperation. Through the inter-war experience, the actors realized the cold reality of competition and confrontation in international politics as well as the necessity of military power for securing the post-war international order. At that time, however, it was quite difficult to come to an agreement on a post-war security scheme, which led them to focus intently on food cooperation as a lubricant.

The Allies established the Combined Food Board for the purpose of managing food resources efficiently, through which they established cooperative relationships that formed the basis for the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture (UNCFA) in 1944, the first international conference among them. Behind the conference was the realistic calculation that functional cooperation regarding food would gradually lead to an agreement regarding security problems, and the former was much easier to establish than the latter. That expectation was proven correct when functional agencies, including UNESCO and WHO, were established in succession after the UNCFA, and the Allies finally agreed on a post-war security scheme at the San Francisco Conference in 1945. In this way, war-time food cooperation formed the basis for an agreement on the post-war security system, which was backed by a realistic school of thought.

On that occasion, non-state actors such as academia or international bureaucrats played a crucial role, which is the second feature of the UN system. They had high expectations regarding functional cooperation as a breakwater for power politics and the basis for international peace and security. Those actors with similar post-war concepts formed a transnational network under which they materialized their ideas and appealed to Allied policymakers to have them realized. In current international politics, the transnational actors are also playing remarkable roles in such undertakings as the Mine Ban Treaty and the Paris Climate Accord, the beginnings of which can be found as early as the UN’s inception.