ABSTRACT
“All the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart” 1 said Jawaharlal Nehru in August 1947 in his beautiful speech delivered on the eve of the independence of India. While celebrating the awakening of a great nation-state that at long last had reclaimed its sovereignty – the realization of “its tryst with destiny” – the Indian prime minister was also acknowledging that this event was taking place in an entirely novel environment, in a world that had become “One World”, echoing the title of a 1943 best-seller by Wendell Willkie, an advisor to president Franklin Roosevelt. 2 Nehru was a remarkable orator. But although he produced memorable narratives on the rise and shine of India, on the uniting of Asia, and on the vibrancy of Afro-Asian solidarity, he never offered anything quite comparable on the matter of the emerging One World. Neither did Willkie’s followers. What comes to mind, rather, when one thinks of the defining speeches of the late 1940s, is Winston Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” declaration at Fulton in March 1946, which announced, not the uniting, but the partition of that One World.
