Temple of Peace

International Cooperation and Stability since 1945

Ingo Trauschweizer, Ingo Trauschweizer

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780821447321
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Zwischenstaatliche Organisationen

This collection raises timely questions about peace and stability as it interrogates the past and present status of international relations.

The post–World War II liberal international order, upheld by organizations such as the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and similar alliances, aspired to ensure decades of collective security, economic stability, and the rule of law. All of this was a negotiated process that required compromise—and yet it did not make for a peaceful world.

When Winston Churchill referred to the UN framework as "the temple of peace" in his famous 1946 Iron Curtain speech, he maintained that international alliances could help provide necessary stability so free people could prosper, both economically and politically. Though the pillars of international order remain in place today, in a world defined as much by populism as protest, leaders in the United States no longer seem inclined to serve as the indispensable power in an alliance framework that is built on shared values, human rights, and an admixture of hard and soft power.

In this book, nine scholars and practitioners of diplomacy explore both the successes and the flaws of international cooperation over the past seventy years. Collectively, the authors seek to address questions about how the liberal international order was built and what challenges it has faced, as well as to offer perspectives on what could be lost in a post-American world.

CHAPTER 1

The New Deal as Grand Strategy

Constructing the Postwar Institutional Order

ELIZABETH BORGWARDT

“There should have been a Secretary of the Future,” the novelist, social critic, and World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut once mordantly observed. Any putative secretary of the future in the US executive branch would in effect be a “grand strategist”—gaming out long-term big-picture scenarios not only linked to a vision of the national interest but also designed to shape the responses of allies and rivals alike.¹

Yet President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often criticized as a hasty, improvisational, and short-term thinker, served in certain ways as his own secretary of the future in the World War II era. By 1941, FDR and his key advisers were distilling some hard-won wisdom from their trial-and-error approaches in devising what became known as the New Deal and applying it to the world’s burgeoning international crises. They were also aiming to sidestep many of the perceived mistakes of President Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I.²

The key, for Roosevelt, was a New Deal–inspired set of ideas and institutions that animated a capacious reframing of the national interest.³ Internationalizing the New Deal meant reconfiguring the playing field of world politics in three broad institutional realms:

• Collective security through the United Nations (UN), especially the UN Security Council

• Economic stability through the Bretton Woods institutions as originally conceived (including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) and also through subsidiary organizations of the UN such as the International Labor Organization

• Rule of law institutions addressing concerns about accountability notably through the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials, at one point intended to pave the way for a permanently sitting International Criminal Court, as well as through a revived International Court of Justice (for interstate disputes not of a criminal nature)

These three institutional pillars are what contemporary international relations specialists generally mean when they refer to “the postwar international order.”⁴ What made this institutionally focused scaffolding into “grand strategy”—as opposed to just a fancy term for long-term planning—was the way any resulting improvement to the functioning of the international order was dependent on negotiation and diplomacy. The strategic element is the necessity of anticipating and accommodating how others will likely—or even just possibly—react. Proposals needed to be crafted in order to advantage one’s own side, to be sure, but also to benefit other players enough for them to say “yes.”⁵

All three sets of institutions also involved what social scientists like to call a certain “cabining” of sovereignty for the sake of this essential coordination and cooperation. It is precisely these three postwar pillars that have been energetically hewed away by the policies and personnel of the Donald Trump administration. While conservative Republicans in the United States have long been intent on rending the fabric of the domestic New Deal, the Trumpian order of Republican operatives is equally as focused on ending the New Deal as grand strategy, with its attendant institutional expressions of US leadership worldwide.⁶

There is no claim here that this liberal institutional ordering is in any way ideal. As any number of critics have been quick to highlight, by the 1970s New Deal social liberalism had become free-market neoliberalism, quite explicitly abandoning any kind of aspirational economic justice orientation along the way. Nevertheless, recent Trumpian attacks on these three institutional pillars are still a terrible idea, as our study of history suggests here.

GRAND STRATEGY AS “SECURITY”

Many of the programs of FDR’s New Deal had sought to expand the boundaries of security at home, based on the perceived lessons of the early years of the Great Depression. One explicit purpose of Social Security was to help to short-circuit civil unrest, for example. Yet for the most creative New Deal administrators, security meant much more than simply stability. Expanding the capacity of a widening swath of Americans to participate in a more prosperous and hopeful future may indeed have served to stabilize capitalism. But widening these circles of inclusion was also intended to entrench—and even to improve upon—the practice of democracy. Many of these New Deal programs were designed to sand down some of the sharpest edges of the spiking inequalities generated by the free-enterprise system.⁷

To be sure, the domestic New Deal programs aimed at expanding opportunities and improving standards of living also starkly reflected the limits of the American social imagination. Social Security programs made a point of excluding agricultural and domestic workers, for example—that is to say, segments of the economy with high proportions of African American participation. Electrification programs tended to benefit rural areas, while many youth employment programs generally assisted urban dwellers, but in both cases Black exclusion was the norm, by design. Southern senators, in particular—virtually all of them Democrats in this era—often explicitly demanded fencing out African American citizens as a price of “party solidarity” and white political participation in FDR’s reformist initiatives.⁸

Just because New Deal programs sought to expand the idea of “security” to encompass economic and social security—within the arguably rather crabbed demographic confines referenced above—did not mean that the concept was therefore confined to domestic dimensions, however. Such a perspective would discount the powerful anxieties glowering on the international horizon in the unsettled strategic landscape of the late 1930s. Whether Americans looked out over the Atlantic or the Pacific late in the interwar era, the idea of “security” had never exclusively been economic or domestic.⁹

By the time the United States joined the ongoing war effort, devastation across the European landscape and the economic leverage offered by America’s wartime boom combined to make the United States a willing leader in designing New Deal–style models for multilateral institutions for the postwar era. Charles Merriam, a political science professor working for the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), observed in 1941 that

there are two great objectives of democracies in the field of world relationships:

1. The security of a jural order for the world in which decisions are made on the basis of justice rather than violence.

2. The fullest development of the national resources of all nations and the fullest participation of all peoples in the gains of civilization.¹⁰

The linkage of these two sets of objectives in “world relationships” as a matter of public policy was a direct outgrowth of the perceived lessons of New Deal.

Lawyers and other Roosevelt administration officials who participated in the drafting and negotiating the terms of the UN Charter, the Bretton Woods charters, and the Nuremberg Charter later in the war often communicated among themselves and with other departments and officials, both in the United States and overseas, about what they thought they were doing and why. They tended to describe themselves as architects drawing up constitutive blueprints that would fill in concrete content behind abstract statements of freedoms and rights, using institutions to entrench and extend order, prosperity, and legitimacy. As a 1944 editorial in The Nation proclaimed, “Only a New Deal for the world, more far-reaching and consistent than our own faltering New Deal, can prevent the coming of World War III.”¹¹

“FREEDOM FROM FEAR AND WANT”

As early as the summer of 1940, FDR had been asked at a press conference how he might “write the next peace.” He began to speak about this New Deal–infused agenda as a set of war aims, most notably in his January 1941 “Four Freedoms” State of the Union address and in his joint statement with British prime minister Winston Churchill, the “Atlantic Charter” of early August 1941.

In his Four Freedoms speech, Roosevelt described “four essential human freedoms” as needing to take effect “everywhere in the world” for true security to be possible. He called for “the protection of human rights—everywhere in the world.” FDR elaborated: “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain these rights or keep them.”¹²

One noteworthy dimension of the Four Freedoms speech was accordingly its international scope. Presidential adviser Harry Hopkins noted that the repeated phrase “everywhere in the world” was perhaps too ambitious, “cover[ing] an awful lot of territory, Mr. President.” He warned, “I don’t know how interested Americans are going to be in the people of Java.” “I’m afraid they’ll have to be someday, Harry,” a ruminative Roosevelt reportedly replied. “The world is getting so small that even the people in Java are getting to be our neighbors now.”¹³

Later that year, Roosevelt was seeking to capitalize on the favorable attention the Four Freedoms speech had attracted by propounding, in his words, “some kind of public statement of the objectives in international relations in which the Government of the United States believed.” The president indicated he was seeking to use the framework of the Four Freedoms to advance the cause of “keeping alive some principles of international law, some principles of moral and human decency” in both the United States and world public opinion. Although he was of course a lawyer himself, this was unusual language for Roosevelt, who rarely spoke about international law explicitly.¹⁴

The resulting Atlantic Charter soon became best known for its resonant evocation of the earlier Four Freedoms speech, a phrase about establishing a particular kind of postwar order—a peace “which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” An early British draft of the proposed joint declaration described the document as a list of “certain principles which [Roosevelt and Churchill] both accept for guidance in the framing of their policy and on which they base their hopes for a better world.” The Atlantic Charter purported to sketch a postwar world in broad strokes, calling for self-determination of peoples, freer trade, and several New Deal–style social welfare provisions. Released as a four-hundred-word telegram, the document also mentioned establishing “a wider and permanent system of general security”—the first reference in a bilateral document at this “high political” level to what would become the UN organization—as well as arms control and freedom of the seas.¹⁵

One of the more eyebrow-raising aspects of these proclamations was simply their timing: it was a rather risky step to be meeting with a foreign leader and invoking a postwar world, however aspirational, months before the United States was actually in the war. FDR was mindful that “the isolationists at home were screaming bloody murder,” leading him to go so far as to leave behind a decoy Secret Service officer fishing in the Cape Cod Canal—complete with cigarette holder, pince-nez, and Fala the dog—while the president departed in secret for the site of the Atlantic Conference off the coast of Newfoundland. Sensitive to these American political constraints, British negotiators offered successive drafts that avoided formal treaty language or the suggestion of a military alliance.¹⁶

What legal scholar Edward Laing has called the Atlantic Charter’s “flexible constitutional essence” also served as a focal point for movements promoting an expanded role for multilateral institutions. The Atlantic Charter prefigured the collective security articulated in the UN Charter, the rule-of-law orientation of the Nuremberg Charter, and even the Keynesian approach of the Bretton Woods charters. As noted, early planning memos for subsequent, detailed blueprints such as the charters of the UN, Nuremberg, and Bretton Woods all drew their inspiration and in many cases their broad provisions from the Atlantic Charter.¹⁷

The Atlantic Charter was part of an effort on Roosevelt’s part to prepare the American public for an increasingly activist, multilateral foreign policy. In 1943, he expressed exasperation with what he perceived as his critics’ literalism and negativity: ‘I am everlastingly angry at those who assert vociferously that the four freedoms and the Atlantic Charter are nonsense because they are unattainable,” commented FDR, in a peroration he wrote himself for a speech marking the end of the First Quebec Conference in August 1943. The president continued testily, “If these people had lived a century and a half ago they would have sneered and said that the Declaration of Independence was utter piffle.”¹⁸

A number of US postwar planners did indeed seek to siphon off some drams of legitimacy from America’s founding documents, at least rhetorically. Some analogized the Atlantic Charter to the Declaration of Independence and the subsequent set of more detailed institutional charters to the Constitution. Just as the young FDR had been an avid consumer of the strategic sea-power theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan (which drew heavily on analogies to ancient Rome), so too were these young New Dealers designing road maps for the future by tracing over parchments from the past.

Roosevelt-hat...