On June 26, 1945, at the Veterans’ War Memorial Building in San Francisco, delegates from 50 nations signed the Charter of the United Nations (UN), a document of 111 articles spread across 19 chapters, agreed upon over two months of negotiation.
The conference, formally called the United Nations Conference on International Organisation, convened on April 25, while the war against Japan was still raging. Germany surrendered midway through, on May 8.
The charter was unanimously adopted by a standing ovation on June 25 and formally signed the next day.
The Charter signed that day had four core purposes as laid out in Article 1: maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations, achieving international cooperation on economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian problems, and serving as a center for harmonising the actions of nations toward these ends.
What the Charter did not mention at all was equally significant there is no reference to the environment, sustainable development, climate, nuclear weapons, pandemics, or cyberwarfare.
The summit that built the blueprint
The Charter did not emerge from nowhere. Its intellectual lineage ran through a number of wartime summits and declarations. The idea of the United Nations began to be articulated in August 1941, when Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, a joint statement of Allied war aims and principles for a post-war peaceful international order.
In October 1943, the Moscow Conference, where the foreign ministers of the US, UK, USSR, and China met and issued the Moscow Declaration, marked the first firm Soviet commitment to establish a general international organisation to maintain peace and security.
That same November, Roosevelt and Churchill flew to Cairo for the Cairo Conference (November 22–26, 1943), a summit with China’s Chiang Kai-shek that outlined the Allied position against Japan, produced the Cairo Declaration demanding Japan’s unconditional surrender, and discussed the future of Asia.
Immediately after, the three leaders reconvened in Tehran for the Tehran Conference (November 28–December 1, 1943), the first time the Big Three had all met together, where Roosevelt more or less convinced Stalin and Churchill to endorse some kind of peacekeeping international organisation, a successor to the League of Nations.
In the month after the Bretton Woods Conference, representatives of the US, USSR, UK, and China met in Washington for the Dumbarton Oaks conversations for proposals for an organisation to be called “The United Nations,” built on the sovereign equality of states, with a General Assembly, Security Council, and Secretariat, though leaving the critical question of Security Council voting procedure unresolved.
That gap was closed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, where the Big Three settled the veto formula that would define the Council’s structure to this day.
The four sponsoring governments, the US, UK, USSR, and China, then invited nations that had declared war on Germany or Japan to San Francisco. Fifty nations attended; Poland, an original signatory to the 1942 declaration, missed the conference and signed later as the 51st original member.
The United Nations formally came into existence on October 24, 1945, now observed as United Nations Day, when the five permanent members and a majority of the other signatories ratified the Charter.
Under Articles 53 and 107, later known as the “Enemy State Clauses,” Germany, Italy, and Japan were designated enemy states. In legal terms, any UN member could take military action against them without Security Council authorisation.
The three principal Axis powers had no role in drafting the document that would govern the post-war world order. Italy had invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Japan had seized Manchuria in 1931 and invaded China in 1937, and Germany had begun its annexations in 1938, a sequence of aggressions that had destroyed the League of Nations and precipitated the war in the first place.
From enemy states to member states
The path into the UN was not simple for the Axis powers. Italy was admitted to the UN on December 14, 1955, as part of a “package deal” in which the Security Council recommended sixteen countries for admission simultaneously, a compromise between the Western powers and the Soviet Union that had used its veto to block admission of nations it regarded as aligned with the West.
Japan’s admission took longer. The Soviet Union blocked Japan’s membership through the early 1950s. It was only after Tokyo and Moscow established diplomatic relations in late 1956, with the USSR explicitly agreeing to support Japan’s UN membership bid, that Japan was admitted on December 18, 1956, as the 80th member of the United Nations, eleven years after the organisation’s founding.
The Soviet Union viewed the Federal Republic of Germany as aligned with the West, and, in a mirror image, the US, UK, and France would never allow the Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic to join. Each of the two Germanys was, from the other side’s perspective, simply illegitimate.
Both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic were admitted simultaneously on September 18, 1973.
The growing irrelevance and reform question
The wars in Gaza and Ukraine have put the UN’s central promise of collective security under its most visible strain in decades. A permanent Security Council member invaded Ukraine, and Gaza has seen mass civilian casualties. In 2024 alone, seven draft resolutions failed due to a veto, the highest number since 1986, with the US casting three vetoes on Gaza, and Russia four across Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and outer space.
Analysts and member states increasingly describe the organisation as having lost credibility as an enforcer of the very Charter it was built to uphold. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has described the Security Council as an “outdated, unfair, and ineffective system” that “doesn’t correspond to the world of today,” adding that it has “systematically failed” to end the most dramatic conflicts the world faces, such as those in Sudan, Gaza, and Ukraine.
The Security Council veto, intended as a mechanism to bind the great powers into the system, became a tool of paralysis. Since 1945, the veto has been exercised almost 300 times. The Security Council’s non-permanent membership was expanded from 6 to 10 seats in 1963, the only structural change to the Council since its founding.
The five permanent members have not changed in over eight decades, a composition now widely criticised as a relic of 1945 power realities that bears no relation to today’s global demographics, economies, or geopolitical weight.
India has made its case for a permanent seat on the grounds of size, contribution, and democratic legitimacy. India has been elected to the Security Council eight times as a non-permanent member and, alongside Brazil, Germany, and Japan, argues that the G4, a Council designed over 80 years ago, no longer reflects contemporary realities.
India’s case rests on its standing as the world’s most populous country, its historic contributions to the UN system,and its leadership among developing nations. Four of the five permanent members have expressed support; China remains the sole P5 member opposed. The debate over a permanent seat, however, is only one dimension of a deeper problem.
The Charter’s text has never been amended to include any of these issues: the environment, climate, pandemics, or cyberwarfare. Most of the existential challenges now dominating the global agenda, such as the climate crisis, pandemics, mass migration, and nuclear proliferation, were unimaginable in the aftermath of a catastrophic world war.
The UN has responded not by rewriting its founding document but by layering treaties and specialised bodies around it.
The author is an intern with The Indian Express
Joseph Paul-Boncour, former Prime Minister of France, signing the UN charter on 26 June 1945 (UN Photo) 
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