Abstract
British influence on the creation, constitutions and early operations of the United Nations specialised agencies was profound. Now in 1990 its influence on their operations is modest, and from one of the most important of them — UNESCO, to which it provided the first Director-General (Julian Huxley) and much of the early inspiration — it has resigned altogether. To understand this change, a knowledge of history is essential; and it can offer some useful lessons for the present and the future.
‘We have come to a period in history where mankind must either set up an institution of this kind, and not only set it up but make it work, or face consequences so appalling that the mind shrinks even from contemplating them.’
Sir Winston Churchill on the occasion of the first FAO Conference
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Notes
Leonard Woolf, International Government (London: Fabian Society, 1916) p. 186.
On this and other matters related to ILO and Britain see C. W. Jenks, Britain and the ILO, Annual Memorial Lecture for 1969 (London: David Davies Memorial Institute, 1969).
(London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1966). There is also an excellent and more detached account of Boyd Orr’s career by H. D. Kay in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 18 (1972) pp. 43–81.
R. F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes (London: Macmillan, 1951) p. 532.
Julian Huxley also wrote his memoirs entitled Memories I and Memories II (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970 and 1973).
The best book on UNESCO’s early history and the concepts that lay behind its constitution and operation is Walter H. C. Laves and Charles A. Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957; London: Dennis Dobson, 1958).
The literature on the international regulation of health matters is considerable. Four works are worth citing in particular: The First Ten Years of the World Health Organization and The Second Ten Years of the World Health Organization, 1958–1967 (Geneva: WHO, 1958 and 1968); C. Fraser Brockington, World Health, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, London and New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1975)
Neville M. Goodman, International Health Organizations and their Work, 2nd edn (Edinburgh and London: Churchill Livingstone, 1971).
There is a good account of all this in ch. 5 of Antony Alcock, History of the International Labour Organisation (London: Macmillan, 1971).
See also G. A. Johnston, The International Labour Organisation (London: Europa, 1970).
Especially by David J. Morgan, The Official History of Colonial Development, vols 1–5 (London: Macmillan, 1980).
See p. 183 of Whitney T. Perkins, Denial of Empire: The United States and its Dependencies (Leyden: A. W. Sythoff, 1962)
See Bernard L. Poole, The Caribbean Commission: Background of Cooperation in the West Indies (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951) p. 208.
On the specialised agencies in this role see Douglas Williams, The Specialized Agencies and the United Nations: The System in Crisis (London: C. Hurst, in association with the David Davies Memorial Institute, 1987).
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© 1990 Erik Jensen and Thomas Fisher
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Williams, D. (1990). The Specialised Agencies: Britain in Retreat. In: Jensen, E., Fisher, T. (eds) The United Kingdom — The United Nations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11374-3_9
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