Originally published on the CGS blog on January 22, 2016.
Much of our current work for a more just and peaceful world builds on the thinking and efforts of earlier foundations. The work of Robert M. Hutchins, long-time president of the University of Chicago, played a leading role.
In 1929, at age 30, Hutchins–already the dean of the Yale Law School–was tapped by the University of Chicago to become the youngest university president in the United States. But it was his creation and leadership of the Committee to Frame a World Constitution in 1945 that made him one of the intellectual founders of the movement for world federation and world citizenship.
The University of Chicago had been one of the centers of research for atomic weaponry in the U.S., and while Hutchins was not directly involved, he saw that the world would never return to a pre-atomic condition and that new forms of world organization were needed. On August 12, 1945, less than a week after the U.S. detonated two atomic weapons over Japan, Hutchins made a radio address called “Atomic Force: Its Meaning for Mankind.” He said that the recently adopted United Nations Charter was not strong enough for a world where such destructive power had been unleashed.
Within three months, a 12-person Committee to Frame a World Constitution was created under Hutchins’s chairmanship. The committee included University of Chicago luminaries such as law school dean Wilber Katz and political scientist Rexford Tugwell, who had been President Franklin Roosevelt’s key idea man. Harvard’s Charles McIlwain, a specialist on constitutions, and Stanford’s Albert Guerard, a French refugee who was concerned about the structure of post-war Europe, were other key committee members.
From 1947 to 1951, the Committee published a monthly journal, Common Cause. Many of the publication’s articles on such fundamental questions as the philosophical basis of government, human rights, distribution of power, and the role of regions are still relevant today. The committee’s Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution was published in 1948 and reprinted in The Saturday Review of Literature and in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Two ideas from The Preliminary Draft are still part of intellectual and political life for those concerned with a stronger UN. The first is the strong role of regional organizations. When The Preliminary Draft was written, the European Union was still just an idea, and most of the future members of the African Union had yet to achieve independence. The Preliminary Draft saw that regional groups were institutions of the future and should be integrated as such in the world institution. While today, the representatives of EU and AU member states work together at the UN in search of common positions, such regional groups are not yet part of the official UN structure.
The other lasting aspect of The Preliminary Draft is the crucial role that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) should play. The then-recently drafted UN Charter had created a “consultative status” for NGOs, but most of its drafters did not see the important role that NGOs would play as the UN developed. The Preliminary Draft had envisaged a “Syndical Senate” to represent occupational associations on the lines of the International Labour Organization where trade unions and employer associations have equal standing with government delegates. Such a formal body never came to be, but NGOs now represent an important part of the UN process.
Hutchins retired from the University of Chicago in 1951 to create the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the Ford Foundation. But it was the effort Hutchins led to envisage the structures and processes among the different structures that was his innovative contribution to global institution building, and many of the debates he started are still crucial for today.
