Competing Internationalisms: US, UK, and the Formation of the UN Information Organization during World War II

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Accepted wisdom rightly emphasizes the dominant role of the United States in the formation of the United Nations, writes GILES SCOTT-SMITH, but this needs to be seen in the context of a transition from British to American views on world organization.
By tracing the development of the UN Information Office (UNIO) through the lens of competing British and American internationalisms, the significance of this bureau in terms of the evolution of Anglo-American relations and their respective ideas of world order becomes clear, he writes in the International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity.
The first step towards what would become the UNIO was taken in September 1940 with the creation of the Inter-Allied Information Committee and its Information Center (IAIC) in New York in September 1940. It was created due to a combination of national emergency (the fall of France) and bureaucratic rivalry (between Foreign Office and Ministry of Information). From 1941, when the MI created a London office, there was a New York/London duality in information provision that continued up to 1944.
Partly this was due to constitutional limitations in the US and bureaucratic rivalries in Britain, but it also expressed the British desire to keep hold of this vital arm of public diplomacy in an era when British global influence was obviously going to decline. The MI’s aim to promote British interests gradually gave way to a multilateral IAIC-UNIO apparatus where Britain would hopefully be supported by the Dominions, but the United States, actively building the post-war order through the new UN organizations, was determined to secure its dominant position.
UNIO, dating from 1942, holds the distinction of being both the first international agency of the embryonic UN network and the first to hold the United Nations label. Run from 1942 to 1945 from two offices in New York and London, these two were merged at the end of World War II to form the UN Information Organization, and subsequently transformed into the Department of Public Information run from UN headquarters in New York.
“The UNIO story therefore illustrates in detail how differing Anglo-American internationalist viewpoints competed over the control of wartime information provision, and how this should be seen as another important stage in the transition of global power from London to Washington during the mid-twentieth century,” GILES SCOTT-SMITH stresses.