My interest in this question arose after reading a New York Times commentary that examined the recent tensions between China and Japan and the two contrasting narratives of the war reflected therein. One narrative, rooted in a traditional Western perspective, portrays World War II as a struggle in which free nations resisted Nazi tyranny and defended human rights and democracy. The other adopts a more decolonial stance, arguing that even within the ranks of the Allied powers, colonial societies were in various ways resisting their imperial metropoles, with an increasingly evident sense of independence and sovereign identity.

Earlier, I had attempted to draft a paper inspired by American historian Eric Foner’s The Second Founding (on the U.S. Civil War), using that framework to describe the “second founding” of the United Nations in the 1960s—namely, the moment when decolonization movements finally enabled the UN to realize the Charter’s promises of sovereign equality, self-determination, and human rights. For this reason, I would like to inquire more deeply whether this “freedom versus tyranny” narrative truly existed, and whether it indeed exerted a significant influence on the early postwar development of the United Nations.