Introduction

Historians who account for global social change stand in a somewhat peculiar tradition that approaches the past of international organizations through national lenses. There is a predominant narrative that goes back to Immanuel Kant's short essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’ (Kant, 1977), and by and large the lead question in historiographical scholarship is: to what extent was Kant's vision realized in global politics? This chapter, by contrast, ventures into the technical basis of global sociability from a historical perspective. Such a view renders the nation an effect of global communication rather than an agent. The argument is that global numerical statistics on territories, populations and economic potentials over the past centuries have created a vast political space in which the nation features as a result, not as a prime mover. Numbers rule the world in manifold comparative frameworks by setting norms and designing communicative devices such as balance sheets for companies and states and comparative sets of statistics on territory, population and economic potential.

The topic covered in the following pages is the history of the United Nations (UN). Mainstream historiography treats UN history as a grand international power contest. Political historians are relatively well informed about past debates in the UN Security Council in which powerful nation states have articulated their interests more or less successfully. But beyond this assumedly political realm their accounts tend to fray. Historiography on the technical history of the UN as represented by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and its specialized bodies remains rather sketchy. The chapter tentatively suggests the notion of technical internationalism as a general framework for the analysis of these governing organs. Scholarship in the sociology of world society and international relations theory has produced ample evidence of the fact that global social change was never primarily powered by national interest nor – as it were – by great individuals. Structural processes of a more anonymous nature loom large. They constitute a global communicative convergence concerning the aims of social change and were agents of change in their own right.

Thanks to international organizations, geodetic information about the planet can be taken for granted and it is easy to tell the time anywhere according to a coherent system. It is roughly known how many people live in the world and how the population is distributed across the continents.