US Policy Studies On UNESCO (1946-1984)

UNESCO is one of the specialized agencies within the currently UN system.In1946, UNESCO established with the positively support of the U.S. government. However, by1984, the U.S. government has officially announced to quit this organization with a rather criticized statement. In nearly forty years, there are many questions, such as why the U.S. policy towards UNESCO has undergone a so huge change? What are the factors that caused the change? What’s relationship between U.S. policy and the international situation then? And which consequences had these policies produced? These are all worth to research deeply. In domestic academe circles, current research on this subject are more gathered in international relations, accordingly give fewer attentions to historical evolution of the U.S. policy. At the same time, foreign research towards this issue are mainly appeared in the late1980s to1990s, because of time limitations, these works tend to focus their study on the Reagan’s UNESCO policies, and give few attention to the periodical international situation which impact U.S. government’s policies. Therefore, this article will attempt to explore developments and changes of U.S. government’s UNESCO policies, focus on the main significations of American cognitive and policy changes towards UNESCO, try to evaluate the effect of American policy, and to reveal the changing reasons between U.S. government and the United Nations during the Cold War era by historical methods, and supplemented by some concepts and theories of international relations, which including functionalism, openness of international organizations, etc.This article is divided into five parts. Introduction section introduces why I chose this issues, which include the current research results about U.S. policy on UNESCO and the relevant study materials. Chapter I provides a brief historical backgrounds of the U.S.-UNESCO relationship and the government’s policy and attitude towards UNESCO before the cold war. Since1944, the United States had become the leader force to dominate the creating work of UNESCO, and tried to shape this organization an international cultural cooperation agency. At the time of UNESCO established, the U.S. government gave relatively high expectations and support to it.Chapter II discusses the changes and developments of U.S. government’s UNESCO policy in early cold war period. During Truman era, as Cold war has broken out, the United States government began to attempt to make UNESCO an ideological propaganda instrument, which would have devoted to contain the Soviet Union. However, this politicization policy had triggered varying quarrels and boycott within UNESCO. By the Eisenhower administration, because unable to get full control of UNESCO, the U.S. officials began to doubt the effectiveness of the organization to serve the interests of the United States. By1960s, as Soviet Union joined and the UNESCO’s organizational structure had undergone changing, the U.S. government began to adjust its policy, required UNESCO to become a purely technical organization that merely committed to providing development assistance to the third world.Chapter III mainly focus on the reasons of government’s policy changes during the Nixon to the Reagan administration. Since the Nixon administration, the U.S. policy towards UNESCO has changed dramatically, which from positive support to neglect, sanction, partial resistance and finally withdrawal to the organization. This transformation is not only to responds many crises, such as anti-Israel movement, new international information and communication order, the issue of national media relations that launched by the Third World countries and the Soviet Union directly, but also result from the U.S. government’s cognition towards UN system had undergone negative shift and the United States’ UNESCO policy was the long-term frustrated.Chapter IV analyzes the main features of U.S. policy to UNESCO, and the influence of the withdrawal action. In the East-West Cold War situation, the formulation and evaluation criteria of the U.S. policy to UNESCO was deeply influenced by the Cold War mentality, which based on the organization’s ability to be used as an effective tool for the Cold War. Therefore, as this policy encountered resistance from UNESCO endlessly, the attitude of the U.S. government to this organization had become more and more deteriorate. The U.S. withdrawal action not only impacted UNESCO tremendously, but also damaged its own multilateral image and multilateral diplomacy.Conclusion:In general, during nearly four decades, the U.S. government’s policy towards UNESCO was affected not only by the international situation—especially the structure change of UNESCO, but more directly influenced by the U.S. domestic political climate, the successive governments’attitudes and cognitive on UN affairs. In these two areas, the Cold War had always been the basic criteria of formulation and evaluation of the U.S. policy to UNESCO. The developments and changes of U.S. policy to UNESCO was a microcosm of U.S. policy to multilateral institutions during the Cold War era. In the bipolar confrontation environment, the U.S. government’s intent to operate multilateral cooperation in foreign policy are replacing by a growing bilateral, or even a unilateral way, which continue to contemporary era.