Welcome Delegates!
Are wars avoidable? There are many different schools of thought on this question. Hopefully in our time together you will do a far better job in preventing or conducting war then your assigned characters did. The Second World War was the single most destructive event to have been recorded in our history. The war reached every part of the globe, from the European theatre, to the Pacific, to the Burma Road, and even to Africa. The war was carried out on land, on sea, and in the air.
What sparked this second of world wars? This is yet another question on which no historian can agree with any other. Some will claim that it was sparked in 1931 with the Japanese annexation of the Chinese province of Manchuria, or in September 1939 when the Nazis occupied Poland. The one thing that is for sure is that the war in Europe was over by 1945. However the war in the Pacific was a different story. What was originally a war that was supposed to combat Japanese imperial intentions in the Pacific soon turned into a war of liberation from the rule of old colonial powers in the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya, and French Indo-China.
The war wrought some undeniable consequences, some which continue till today. The most evident of the consequences of the war lies in a major issue in the Middle East, the state of Israel. A State created by the victorious allies in 1948 in recompense for the gross mishandling of the Jewish refugee question when Hitler’s reign of terror on the Jews of Europe began. The necessity for a strategic missile programme was a direct response to Hitler’s V-2 rocket programme which wreaked havoc over the skies of London during the Fall of 1944. The race to acquire a nuclear weapon was instigated by Hitler’s own ambition to unlock the nuclear power himself. As the famous British historian John Keegan stated, “The world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is still the world that the struggle against Hitler left behind.”
As was mentioned before, the war touched every part of the globe. It was the largest and most technologically advanced war till that time. It involved all the countries of the world except Sweden, Switzerland, Liberia, the Irish Free State, Spain, and Thailand, and other states that had yet to come into existence. Other states were created as a result of the weakening of once great state communities. The Second World War is often viewed as a battle of good against evil. Indeed, ideals of democracy and equality among races posed a challenge to the perverse notions of racial tyranny and fascism the world over.
My name is Manfred A. Collado. I am a third year at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Economics, Diplomatic History, and receiving a minor in Mathematics. My goal is to be as fair as possible with all of you, my colleagues on this committee, as well as to guide you in realizing the important question I pose to you as representatives of your respective states, “Is the war we fight a war of necessity?”
Manfred A. Collado
Chair, World War II: Axis
Ivy League Model United Nations Conference XXVI