In this new Ambizione career grant project ‘“Should I stay or should I go?” Membership and international recognition from the League to the United Nations’, jointly hosted by the Global Governance Centre and the International History and Politics Department, Thomas Gidney will be exploring how the UN became, de facto, the international authority on interstate recognition , charting and comparing the UN’s contemporary mass-membership to its predecessor, the League of Nations.
The United Nations (UN) has become, de facto, the international authority on interstate recognition. However, it was not the organisation's intended purpose, nor is it structurally designed to do so. Previous studies of the UN’s role as a multilateral recogniser of states through its membership have often focussed on the UN’s structure and its Charter. Although important, the UN, founded from a panoply of Allied states at the end of the Second World was limited in its membership and its scope of international recognition. Instead, it is through the weight of the UN’s number of member-states that today, every ‘sovereign’ state in the world is a member-state of the UN, with many legal scholars seeing membership as tantamount to international recognition of statehood.
This project investigates how the UN has achieved this status, charting and comparing the UN’s contemporary mass-membership to its predecessor, the League of Nations. It does so by examining periods of rapid acceleration in the membership of both organisations, from the aftermath of their creation (1920/1945) to decolonisation and the collapse of the USSR. These bursts of accession of new members help to expand the network, increasing the desirability of membership of the organisation. The project posits that states themselves are the primary factor towards building a positive feedback mechanism that further enhances the organisation’s legitimacy as a multilateral recogniser. The result is that the UN — as opposed to the League that saw gradual enlargement — has witnessed ‘frantic’ enlargement in ‘bursts’ of applications.
The success of this network effect has meant that no state (besides a temporary withdrawal in 1965 from Indonesia) has left the UN. This contrasts heavily with its predecessor, the League of Nations, which saw states exit and enter from its beginning to the mass exodus of states at its end. Yet the same network effect that strengthens the UN could also lead to a negative feedback effect if states were to withdraw. With the UN floundering in its main formal role as a conflict mediator in an era of proliferating new conflicts, and an upsurge of ‘anti-globalist’ politics, public trust in international institutions is at a low point. Currently, there are few indications that any state is preparing a withdrawal, yet the recent cuts by major states to the UN budget reveal a growing disengagement with international institutions.
This project tracks the normative development of UN membership as a form of multilateral state recognition over a long durée (1919-1991) to answer the question of how the UN eventually developed this vaunted status, and whether it can sustain it. It does so by focussing on five periods of rapid acceleration and departure in the history of the League and the UN: the creation of the League (1919-1921), the decade of states withdrawal (1933-1939), the early years of the U.N (1946-1955), the period of decolonisation (1956-1970), to the collapse of the USSR (1991) and the gradual plateauing of UN enlargement over the last three decades. It does so by using a range of archival sources, many of which have not been tapped into.
The result is a project that will increase our understanding of how states can, as a grouping, rather than through conscious decisions, shape mandates for international organisations. As a result, states and the UN create a symbiotic relationship, reinforcing each other’s legitimacy. This can play a significant step in understanding how interactions between groupings of states and international organisations can shape new norms and create new mandates for international organisations. But it also aims to show the potential fragility of the UN’s position as a universal recogniser, and shows a trajectory in which it could be undone through the same forces of states withdrawing.
Timeline: September 2026 - August 2030.
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