For thousands of years, major powers ruled through military force, expanding empires, extracting resources from colonized lands, and settling disputes through conflict—not diplomacy or law. After two destructive 20th-century world wars, leading powers worked with the broader international community to establish a system of institutions, treaties, and norms to create stability and prevent economic chaos and unchecked aggression.
The United Nations was created in 1945 to replace the failed League of Nations and maintain international peace and security. The 1944 Bretton Woods conference established key economic institutions to manage currency, credit, and trade: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was signed in 1947, which later became the World Trade Organization.
The order is built on the argument that countries—of all sizes and clout—gain more from cooperation under shared rules than from pursuing their interests through force or economic warfare. Since its creation, global trade has grown significantly, extreme poverty has declined, and life expectancy has increased. Critics, however, argue that the institutions were designed to reinforce Western dominance and that the West's promotion of liberal democracy in rival great powers' spheres has caused more conflict than it has prevented.
Hours of research by our editors, distilled into minutes of clarity.
After World War I, countries devalued their currencies, raised tariffs to block imports, and seized territory unchecked, with the international community unable to organize effectively to stop them. The result was a global depression and, eventually, another world war.
In 1944, 44 nations gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to rebuild the global economy. The result? The US dollar became the world’s reserve currency, backed by gold.
The Yalta Conference was a pivotal 1945 meeting between Allied leaders that helped shape the postwar global order and laid the groundwork for the founding of the United Nations.
The League of Nations—established in 1920 after World War I—was the first global organization aimed at maintaining world peace. Although US President Woodrow Wilson championed its creation, the United States never joined.
The 1945 San Francisco Conference brought together delegates from 50 nations to draft the United Nations Charter, laying the foundation for the UN. This archival footage from the UN captures the event's atmosphere, showcasing firsthand reactions and the global hope for peace after World War II.
The post-Cold War world was briefly unipolar after 1991, with the US standing alone as a global superpower following decades of US-Soviet bipolarity. Analysts increasingly describe today's order as multipolar, with China, Russia, the US, and regional powers all competing for influence.
Our World in Data monitors bilateral relationships on a spectrum from open rivalry to "positive peace"—deep cooperation and mutual protection. In 1945, no countries had highly cooperative security relationships. Today, nearly a fifth do.
This podcast episode of "To the Best of My Ability" from the National WWII Museum goes behind the scenes of the United Nations' founding from the American perspective. It explores how FDR's vision for global peace took shape, how Truman carried it forward, and how Eleanor Roosevelt helped define human rights—set against the backdrop of wartime diplomacy, Cold War tensions, and the San Francisco Conference, where the UN Charter was signed.
This piece examines how the Ukraine conflict intensified underlying divisions in the global order—between Western democracies and the Global South, and between rule-of-law norms and great-power politics.
Since 1950, world trade values have grown nearly 410 times, mainly due to the successive tariff reductions negotiated under GATT and the WTO.
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