In the summer of 1947, the Press Attaché of the Norwegian Military Mission in Berlin cautiously asked an old friend, now Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), about employment opportunities. While Willy Brandt never entered UN service – despite Gunnar Myrdal’s offer –, the letter exchange between them illuminates the strategy that a circle of leftwing exile alumni pursued for a more stable postwar order. After the long-awaited demise of the Nazi Empire, both Social Democrats found themselves in neutral Stockholm, rather than at the victors’ bargaining table in Potsdam. While the Grand Alliance rapidly disintegrated over the question of Europe’s postwar architecture, Myrdal and Brandt’s 1947 conversation still echoes hope for a left-liberal European “Third Way” between the American and Soviet socio-economic models and outside the superpowers’ respective camps. [...]
The General Assembly of the United Nations approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948. This document reflected a very widely shared sense of revulsion at the crimes committed by the Hitler state in its period in power from 1933-45. Without the Second World War, this document would never have been drafted, let alone approved by communist and non-communist countries alike. This non-binding statement of principles set in motion other measures which established legal sanctions for human rights violations by states. Regional conventions on human rights were signed in Europe, Latin America and Africa. In 1966, the United Nations agreed two covenants on human rights, one on social and economic rights and a second on civil and political rights. Ten years later these came into force as instruments of international law. [...]
Mythen haben eine lange Lebensdauer. Vor allem, wenn sie ihren Ursprung in politischen Urteilen einer Epoche haben, und wenn Zeitzeugenwertungen später als Quellen verwendet werden und kaum oder gar nicht geprüft als Belege für historische Interpretationen dienen. So ergeht es immer noch gelegentlich auch der Struktur der deutsch-französischen Beziehungen seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, obgleich die Forschung seit über zwei Jahrzehnten weit vorangeschritten ist.[...]