The World Peace Council and Visions of Global Community on the Political Left

The devastation of the Second World War gave new momentum to the historic idea of world government as a safeguard for universal peace. In his 1943 bestseller One World the Republican politician Wendell Willkie resurrected the concept for an American audience.  His vision was shared by postwar liberal internationalists, among them American journalists Walter Lippman and Dorothy Thompson and atomic scientists James Franck, Leo Szilard, and Albert Einstein, who believed that only a supranational world federation could guarantee world peace in the nuclear age.  The rise and fall of the liberal internationalist world government movement—by the early 1950s it had been reduced to a trickle of dedicated idealists--has been well documented.  By contrast, the emergence of similar organizations on the political left has received little to no attention at all. These organizations provided an alternative vision of global community based on Marxist and communist principles of internationalism.  In London in 1945 Communist youth groups created the World Federation of Democratic Youth.  In Paris four years later, in April 1949, the World Peace Council convened for the first time.  It was for this meeting that Pablo Picasso created the first version of his later famous peace dove.  Both organizations advocated peaceful coexistence and nuclear disarmament.  Both were also heavily funded by the Soviet Union.   They nonetheless included a sizeable contingent of western idealist leftists, both communists and non-communists.   This paper will analyze the efforts of the World Peace Council and other leftist organizations to not only promote world peace but also to appropriate global peace advocacy as a crusade of the International Left.