In our world, the UN is headquartered in New York City on a plot of land provided by Nelson Rockefeller. However, with a point of divergence anytime after World War II, where could the UN headquarters be located besides NYC?
Alternate UN Headquarters Location
- Thread starter Anarcho-Occultist
- Start date
Vienna, if you go either for a ''concert of nations'' vibe or if you want your UN between NATO and Commintern
Geneva, for a surviving League of Nations (bonus point for being in a neutral country)
Paris, in the palace of Versaille for fanciness
Geneva, for a surviving League of Nations (bonus point for being in a neutral country)
Paris, in the palace of Versaille for fanciness
You'll have to be more specific about what you mean by "the UN". The General Assembly? The Security Council? The Secretariat? Most of the subsidiary organisations are already based somewhere other than New York.
Wiki has a list of proposed alternatives. There was also an idea to use Navy Island on the US/Canadian border.
A drawing of the proposed Navy Island site looks quite impressive. With 100% hindsight I wonder if NYC would have prefered another location to have been chosen?
A drawing of the proposed Navy Island site looks quite impressive. With 100% hindsight I wonder if NYC would have prefered another location to have been chosen?
Why not, to either point? The UN started in London, so there's no reason it couldn't stay put, and Geneva would co-locate whatever organisation "HQ" is defined as with a lot of the subsidiary organisations (ILO, ITU, WHO, WIPO, WMO).
I'm sure the city of New York when you very happy had it went to another city with all the abuse by the ambassadors of us laws. I think we should give some other countries a chance to grow and shine Saudi Arabia is high on my list although it's got way too many conveniences I need to find the biggest hell hole in the world to put it in because all it does is cost the city of New York in the federal government money not counting our contributions and is one of our vice president said it's not worth a bucket of warm spit
A post of mine from last year:
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There is a good book on the subject of the location of the UN headquarters: Charlene Myers, *Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations* (New York University Press 2013). The first decision was Europe versus America. (America here almost always meant the United States, though for example Quebec City, where FDR and Churchill held two wartime conferences, put in a bid.) Not only the Latin American countries and the Asian/Pacific ones (China and Australia, both of which liked San Francisco) favored the US, but so did the Soviet Union. (The Soviets, who had bad experiences with the League of Nations, and had broken off diplomatic relations with Switzerland, were particularly opposed to Geneva.) "The United States is located conveniently between Asia and Europe,” Andrei Gromyko said. " The old world has had it once, and it is time for the New World to have it." (As Myers suggests, the Soviets might also have worried that having UN headquarters in Europe could hinder Soviet influence there.) This was a common theme: "For many diplomats, the center had shifted as a result of the war fought in Europe and the Pacific, with the United States lying in between." https://books.google.com/books?id=BDAVCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85
There were an incredible number of places in the US which tried to get the headquarters. Myers has a 25 page appendix listing 248 (!) locations involved in the competition to varying degrees. Among the unlikely places were the Black Hills http://www.history.com/news/the-united-nations-hq-that-never-was , the Choctaw capital of Tuskahoma, Oklahoma. http://una-okc.blogspot.com/2015/06/when-oklahoma-vied-to-be-home-of-united.html and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. http://capital-of-the-world.com/the-great-and-powerful-osborn-maybe/#more-175 The last-named was boosted as being on "an undefended frontier 3,000 miles long which has been without war for more than 125 years." (p. 59)
"In the Osborn vision, interpreted through drawings by Ed Kreiger of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, the UN would occupy a world-capital compound both modern and rooted in regional history and folklore. Sugar Island would be outfitted with its own airport, sea plane base, and steamer dock. Bridges and tunnels would connect with the mainland United States and Canada. The roads from both countries would meet in a traffic circle, then continue jointly toward a United Nations Center, a modern building with a tall office tower flanked by semicircular wings. Inside that building, the peace keepers would draw strength from The Song of Hiawatha, the "world epic of international cooperation" and the subject of the 697-page book the Osborns had published in 1941. The UN delegates would be surrounded by murals of Hiawatha and take inspiration from Longfellow's poem, first published in 1855:
All your strength is in your union
All your danger is in discord
Therefore be at peace henceforward
And as brothers live together."
https://books.google.com/books?id=BDAVCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA62
Anyway, all these local boosters emphasized the alleged historical uniqueness of their sites, showed maps using concentric circles to "prove" that their site was, with modern air transportation, at the center of the world, etc. (I have attached one such map)--all recognized booster techniques. They thought the UN headquarters would make their sites "the capital of the world." They lived in a different world from the people who actually did the selecting, who always referred to what they were seeking as a site for UN "headquarters," not a world capital, and were more interested in getting some place convenient for diplomats than in poetry. San Francisco was ultimately doomed by the memories of how time-consuming were the diplomats' 1945 trips for the UN's founding conference. The Northeast always had the advantage here. For quite some time, though, it was thought that the headquarters should be fairly near but definitely not *in* New York City. "The site committee ruled out any urban locations because of the organization’s sizable land requirements and fearing that the United Nations would be an afterthought instead of a focal point in New York, they eliminated all sites within 10 miles of Manhattan. However, when millionaire philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. surprisingly offered a gift of six blocks of Manhattan real estate along the East River in December 1946, the committee reversed itself in a New York minute and found its new home." http://www.history.com/news/the-united-nations-hq-that-never-was Prior to that, the Stamford-Greenwich-Westchester area was seriously considered (though a lot of local residents did not like the idea) and even Hyde Park (as a memorial tribute to FDR) was inspected....
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...on-for-u-n-headquarters.427916/#post-15809917
Actually I think he posted 1945 and I would imagine which month or any would make it hard to go about anywhere in the world with the war. Instead all those people who applied to host the UN are probably thinking they're lucky stars they didn't get it.
In fact, what probably killed it was precisely the diplomats' recollections of how time-consuming it had been to get there for the 1945 conference which created the UN Charter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Conference_on_International_Organization