Highlighting the significance of both advances was the decision of the nations that had triumphed in the recent conflict to put on trial leading figures of the Nazi regime. For the first time in history, the leaders of a sovereign nation—men who sought to argue the constitutionality of the political positions they had occupied—were brought before a public court, their crimes unsparingly reviewed and documented, were duly convicted, and those who did not escape through suicide were then either hanged or sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. No serious protest had been raised against this procedure which, theoretically, constituted a fundamental departure from existing norms of international law. Although the integrity of the proceedings was gravely marred by the participation of judges appointed by a Soviet dictatorship whose own crimes matched or exceeded those of the defendants’ regime, the act set an historic precedent. It demonstrated, for the first time, that the fetish of “national sovereignty” has recognizable and enforceable limits.
Beginning in these same years, the fulfilment of a long-delayed ideal unfolded in the dissolution of the great empires that had not merely survived 1918, but had managed even to extend their reach through acquiring “mandates”, “protectorates” and colonies seized from the defeated powers. Now, these antiquated systems of political oppression were submerged by a rising tide of movements of national liberation far beyond their weakened abilities to resist. With astonishing swiftness, all of them either willingly abandoned their claims or were forced by colonial rebellions to bow to the same fate that had overtaken their Ottoman and Hapsburg predecessors earlier in the century.
Suddenly, the peoples of the world found themselves with a place to stand in dignity, a forum in which to express the concerns that most deeply affected them, and the faint beginnings of a role in deciding their own future and that of humanity in general. A corner had been turned that left behind six or more millennia of history. Beyond all the continuing educational disadvantages, the economic inequities, and the obstructions created by political and diplomatic manœuvring—beyond all these practical but historically transient limitations—a new authority was at work in human affairs to which all might reasonably hope somehow to appeal. Representatives of once subject peoples, whose exotically clad warriors had brought up the rear of the Diamond Jubilee procession in London only five decades earlier, now began to appear as delegates to the Security Council and occupants of senior posts in the United Nations and non-governmental organizations of every kind. The magnitude of the change is perhaps best symbolized by the fact that the Secretary-General of the United Nations is today a Ghanaian, his two immediate predecessors having been, respectively, from Egypt and Peru.[94]
Nor was this change merely one of formal and administrative character. As time passed, growing numbers of outstanding figures in every walk of life would escape the familiar limits of racial, cultural or religious identity. In every continent of the globe, names like Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., Paolo Freire, Ravi Shankar, Gabriel García Marques, Kiri Te Kanawa, Andrei Sakharov, Mother Teresa and Zhang Yimou became sources of inspiration and encouragement to great numbers of their fellow citizens.[95] In every department of life, heroism, professional excellence or moral distinction would increasingly be able to speak for themselves and be embraced by the generality of humankind. The world-wide outpouring of affection and rejoicing that was to greet the release from prison of Nelson Mandela and his subsequent election as president of his country would reflect a sense among peoples of every race and nation that these historic events represented victories of the human family itself.
It became apparent, too, that pre-war conceptions regarding the use and distribution of wealth would have to be overhauled. Apart from principles of social justice, which doubtless motivated a significant number of those committed to this task, the economic dislocations produced by the events of the previous three decades had made it clear that existing arrangements were outdated and ineffective. Experiments to address such problems at the national level had been undertaken in several countries in response to the Depression during the 1930s. Now an interlocking system of institutions oriented to recognition that national economies constitute elements of a global whole was successively devised and put in place. The International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades, the World Bank, and various subsidiary agencies began belatedly to grapple with the implications of an integrating world, and with issues related to the distribution of wealth inherent in this development. Thinkers in developing countries were not slow to point out that such initiatives served primarily the needs of the Western world. Nevertheless, their emergence marked a fundamental change of direction that would increasingly open participation to a wide range of states and institutions.
A humanitarian initiative of a kind never previously conceived opened still another dimension of the global integration occurring. Beginning with the “Marshall Plan” devised by the government of the United States to rehabilitate war-torn European nations, those nations that were able to do so turned to serious consideration of programmes that might foster the social and economic development of rising nations. Widespread publicity awakened a sense of solidarity with the rest of the world on the part of peoples in lands that enjoyed reasonable levels of education, health care and the application of technology. In time, this ambitious initiative came under attack for the mixed motives attributed to it. Nor can anyone deny that the long-term results of development projects have been heartbreakingly disappointing in their failure to close the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. Neither circumstance can obscure, however, a sense of common humanity in its objectives that spoke perhaps most eloquently in the response it evoked from an army of idealistic youth of many lands.
Paradoxically, in the Far East particularly, even war had a certain liberating effect on consciousness. As early as 1904, the Russo-Japanese conflict had been seen in parts of the Orient as encouraging evidence that non-Western peoples could resist the apparently invincible might of the West. The effect had been heightened by the events of the first world war, and greatly advanced by the success of Japanese arms in withstanding for so long the massive Western effort devoted to defeating them during the period 1941-1945. The second half of the century saw this new technological expertise give birth to modern economies in half a dozen nations of the region, whose innovative products and industrial energy, particularly in the areas of transportation and information technology, were able to hold their own with the best that the rest of the world had to offer.
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By 1946, the end of hostilities had opened the way for the launching by Shoghi Effendi of a second Seven Year Plan, which benefited from the new receptivity to the message of the Faith produced by the shift of consciousness that was by then already apparent. Once again, the North American Bahá’í community was summoned to assume a demanding responsibility, one that essentially built upon and developed the achievements of the earlier Plan. The great difference, however, was that several other Bahá’í communities were now in a position to participate. Already in 1938, the Bahá’ís of India, Pakistan and Burma had set out on a plan of their own. As international hostilities gradually came to an end, the National Spiritual Assemblies of Persia, of the British Isles, of Australia and New Zealand, of Germany and Austria, of Egypt and the Sudan, and of Iraq—freed from the limitations imposed on them by the war—embarked on projects of various durations to expand the base of the Administrative Order, settle pioneers in goals both at home and abroad, and multiply the available Bahá’í literature.
By 1953 all of these undertakings had been fully completed. Three new National Spiritual Assemblies had been established and had also undertaken supplementary teaching plans, an array of new Local Spiritual Assemblies had been formed in Europe, initiatives by five different national communities acting under the coordination of the National Spiritual Assembly of the British Isles had led to the settling of pioneers in East and West Africa, and the great project set in motion by the Master’s laying of the corner stone of the Mother Temple of the West was at last finished.[96]