The Legacy of J. William Fulbright

Policy, Power, and Ideology

Alessandro Brogi, Giles Scott-Smith, David J. Snyder, Alessandro Brogi, Giles Scott-Smith, David J. Snyder

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813177700
• eBook ISBN: 9780813177731
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Part 1

Fulbright’s Liberal Internationalism in
Historical Perspective

Fulbright Internationalism

A Retrospective

Randall B. Woods

Aside from the international exchange program that bears his name, J. William Fulbright is best known as the avatar of Wilsonian internationalism during the three decades following the end of World War II. At the outset of the Cold War, with McCarthyism at its height, American liberals were forced to jump on the anti-Communist bandwagon. They became virulent Cold Warriors but with a transcendent mission—the United States would not only protect the world from the scourge of Communist totalitarianism but also bring the blessings of democracy and liberal capitalism to the developing world. Bill Fulbright was initially at the forefront of liberal anticommunism, but then, with the coming of the Vietnam War, he stepped forward to argue that militarists and true believers were perverting the Wilsonian ethic, siding with corrupt dictators in the name of liberty and justice. The Wilsonian vision was concerned not so much with the spread of democracy, he insisted, as with the building of a cooperative and rule-based international order. American imperialism whether liberal or conservative was anathema. Since 9/11, his commitment to and subsequent critique of liberal internationalism has become more relevant than ever. As the invasion of Iraq turned into a protracted war, the Bush administration increasingly invoked liberal internationalist ideas to justify its actions. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” George W. Bush declared. The administration subsequently asserted the right to use force anywhere in the world against “terrorists with global reach.” It would do so largely outside the traditional alliance system through coalitions of the willing. As Robert Jervis has observed, Wilson promised to make the world safe for democracy, while Bush seemed to be saying that the entire world had to be democratic for the United States to be safe.¹ An examination of Fulbright internationalism—its origin and evolution—is still instructive.

Wilsonian Origins of Fulbright’s Liberal Internationalism

In no small part, the Arkansan’s commitment to Wilsonian principles was an offshoot of his years at Oxford. The most important acquaintance he made at Pembroke College was his young tutor, Ronald Buchanan McCallum, whose guidance and instruction were crucial in shaping the young American’s intellect and worldview. From that first autumn afternoon when they met and cycled together to view the tomb of William Lenthall of Long Parliament fame, the two men maintained a close personal and intellectual relationship that lasted until McCallum’s death in 1973.

The Oxford don was an ardent admirer of Woodrow Wilson, revering both the man and his vision. During their tutorials, he and his young American charge spent long hours examining the former president’s premises and policies. In a speech before a joint session of Congress in the spring of 1917, Wilson had declared that war against Imperial Germany was necessary so that the world could be “made safe for democracy.” Underlying this statement was the notion that the internal characteristics of states are decisive in matters of war and peace. Autocratic and militarist states make war; democracies make peace. There was in the Wilsonian philosophy the corollary notion that the establishment of an enduring and peaceful world order depended on collective action by a community of democratic nations. No autocratic state could be trusted to act responsibly within such a community. Only a community of free peoples could be trusted to sacrifice for the greater good. Democracy and the rule of law, moreover, could not coexist with economic autarky. Political freedom required economic freedom, and that meant an international regime of free trade. Wilson believed that international law and agencies of cooperation in themselves bred understanding and tolerance. (Here, one can see a seed of the Fulbright exchange program.) His approach to progressive reform was conservative, stressing equality of opportunity rather than a growth in the federal power designed to foster a welfare state. His vision did not call for nation-states to relinquish their sovereignty except in one important instance. The Fourteen Points famously called for the establishment of a league of nations whose heart was Article X establishing a regime of collective security. The league charter included mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity. When and if the council of the league called on members to impose sanctions and contribute to an international military force to halt aggression, member states would have to respond.

Wilsonian internationalism had an evil twin, however, in the form of liberal imperialism. At the outset of his administration, the Progressive president believed that he had a duty to spread democracy to other nations—especially in the Western Hemisphere—by the use of force if necessary. The United States twice sent troops to Mexico, once in 1914 and again in 1916, in support of political factions committed to popular sovereignty and the rule of law. Wilson would also order the military occupation of Haiti and dispatch troops to Nicaragua. “I will teach the South American Republics to elect good men,” he declared.² Liberal interventionism proved counterproductive, of course, enabling the dictatorships he was trying to overthrow to pose as nationalists, defenders of their states against Yankee imperialism. By the end of his presidency, Wilson had learned his lesson; thus his great reluctance to intervene, if only temporarily, in the Russian Civil War.

In 1944, Ronald McCallum published Public Opinion and the Lost Peace, in which he challenged the long-standing view of John Maynard Keynes that the peace structure worked out at the Versailles Conference was predestined to fail. The concept of the League of Nations was sound, the Oxford don wrote; the organization had not worked because political figures on both sides of the Atlantic had never been willing to make a true commitment to the principles that underlay it and had attempted to use it for their own selfish, political purposes. Eventually, owing to ignorance, ambivalence, xenophobia, and especially a lack of leadership, Anglo-American public opinion became intensely disillusioned with the Versailles peace settlement. McCallum concluded his book with an appeal to Americans and Britons to rediscover and rededicate themselves to the principles of Wilsonian internationalism and specifically to resurrect the League of Nations. He voiced support for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development then under discussion at the Bretton Woods Conference. He warned against a revival of political isolationism in the United States, and he appealed for postwar cooperation with Russia. Above all, he wrote, if the modern world were to survive, there would have to be “some abnegation of formal state sovereignty.”³

Realism Intrudes: The Dynamic Internationalism of World War II

Meanwhile, in the United States, J. William Fulbright, the practicing politician, began to develop and promulgate his own version of Wilsonian internationalism. In his speeches inside and outside Congress and in debates on the floor of the House and the Senate, the outline of his vision began to emerge. Like Wilson, Fulbright believed that it was imperative that American leaders develop a set of principles to guide their foreign policy, but, unlike Wilson, he advocated for the creation of a bipartisan coalition to support those principles. As it had been at the close of the Great War, the world in 1945 was battered, exhausted, horrified by the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and ready for a new world order. Underlying Fulbright’s internationalism was the assumption that there existed a body of ideas and a constellation of economic and political institutions that together defined Western civilization, that the United States shared in these ideals and institutions, and that therefore it had an obligation to defend them. If it were true, he told the Senate, that Americans, Britons, Scandinavians, and Italians had in common “the love of family, the regard for contractual obligations, the abhorrence of torture and persecution, the distrust of tyrannical and oppressive government … then we should acknowledge them in order that a definite policy based upon sound considerations be firmly adopted.”⁴

Fulbright was, like most internationalists, reacting to a particular interpretation of the immediate past, to what Gaddis Smith called a great cycle theory of history.⁵ According to this view, the story of the twentieth century was largely a recurring pattern of American isolation, European aggression, and American intervention. It was up to the Greatest Generation to break this cycle. With the end of the struggle against the Axis impending, the United States and the world stood at a crossroads. The path selected would determine the shape of the future—tyranny or freedom, peace or annihilation. “We must,” Fulbright told the George Washington School of Law in 1943, “make this choice now while the minds and hearts of men are concerned with universal and fundamental problems, while danger and sacrifice give us humility and understanding.” When the war ended, isolationists would sing their siren song once again, but the American people must turn a deaf ear. It was the nation’s duty “to wage a creative war for a creative peace.”⁶

Time and again, the former Rhodes scholar tried to demonstrate that isolationism was merely a facet of old-fashioned nationalism. Those of his contemporaries who posed as defenders of national sovereignty were in fact advocating a return to the policies of the interwar period, when the United States refused to acknowledge that its fate was tied up with those of other democracies. National sovereignty and its corollary foreign policy—unilateralism—were illusions in the modern world of airplanes, submarines, atomic weapons, and global economic integration. “If it means anything today,” he told his Senate colleagues, “sovereignty as applied to a state surely means that a state is sufficiently independent economically, politically, and physically to defend itself and provide for the security and happiness of its own people.” In this turbulent world, he asked, “can it be seriously contended that the vast majority of existing states are sovereign powers?”⁷

Initially, Fulbright’s view of America’s mission in the world took on the same messianic and parochial characteristics as Wilson’s missionary diplomacy. In his early speeches, Fulbright argued that America must help other nations develop their own version of democracy. Implicit in this view was the assumption that, given the freedom to choose, all people would opt for a society characterized by popular sovereignty, individual liberty, the rule of law, and free enterprise. By late 1945, however, the junior senator from Arkansas seemed to be developing a sense of cultural relativity. He observed to the Senate that capitalism was not “divine and inviolable, something handed down by the Almighty from above.”⁸ It had worked for America because a particular set of circumstances and material conditions prevailed at a particular time in history. The peoples of the earth should be free to develop their own economic systems and political institutions.

But the principle of national self-determination would not in and of itself preserve the world from the deadly cycle of aggression and war. Something more was needed. What Fulbright had in mind was a new experiment in world government. In one remarkable address to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, he declared that the progress and welfare of modern humanity depended on the simultaneous and synchronized advance of technology and statecraft. While technology had produced machines that could fly above the earth and cruise beneath the sea and weapons that could destroy whole cities in the blinking of an eye, there had been no new developments in political theory and practice since the American and French Revolutions. The trend in economics had been toward larger and more complex units; the trend in government had not followed suit. What the freshman senator had in mind was an authentic international federation run on democratic principles. In a speech to the American Bar Association, he outlined his grand scheme: “The history of government over the centuries, which is largely the chronicle of man’s efforts to achieve freedom by the control of arbitrary force, indicate [sic] that only by the collective action of a dominant group can security be obtained.”⁹ The hope of the world was the establishment of a global organization with a collective security mandate and a police-keeping force sufficient to enforce that mandate. The United States must participate and be willing to contribute to such a force. Participation required—indeed, necessitated—surrender of a portion of the national sovereignty. Once the UN Charter was ratified, it should be clearly understood that, through his delegate, the president would have the authority to commit American troops to military action authorized by the Security Council. Hopefully, would-be aggressors would be deterred by the mere existence of such a mechanism. Like Wilson, Fulbright believed that participation in international organizations had in and of itself a modernizing, civilizing effect on its participants. Moreover, was it not better to cooperate with the superpowers of the future, Russia and China, while they were still relatively weak? “It seems clear to me,” he told an Arkansas audience in 1944, “that either we cooperate with Russia and the other nations in a system to preserve peace or we must look forward to a time when, in a chaotic world of warring nations we may have to compete for survival with an industrialized Russia of 250,000,000, or a China of 450,000,000.”¹⁰ To those of his conservative constituents who complained that the proposed world organization was so much globaloney, Fulbright argued that international cooperation was essential if the free enterprise system were to be preserved. Without a collective security organization, America would be forced to fight one costly war after another or at least be prepared to do so. This would require huge defense budgets and the regimentation of the economy. In such an environment, bureaucracy and red tape would choke the private sector to death.

J. William Fulbright was an economic as well as a political internationalist; that is, he, along with his friend Will Clayton, was a thoroughgoing multilateralist. Clayton, the Houston cotton broker Franklin Roosevelt appointed assistant secretary of state for economic affairs in 1944, was to be the chief architect of the Marshall Plan. These intellectual heirs of Adam Smith looked forward to the creation of an economically interdependent world free of tariffs, preferences, quotas, and currency exchange controls. They insisted that competition for the wealth of the world among national economies protected by high tariff walls restricted trade, wasted resources, and bred war. The multilateralists looked forward to the creation of a world market in which the citizens of each region concentrated on the commodities that they could produce most cheaply and efficiently. This specialization, coupled with the elimination of trade barriers, would mean the manufacture and distribution of the greatest number of goods at the cheapest possible price. To this end, Fulbright helped lead the fight in the Senate in 1945 for approval of the Bretton Woods Agreements, which established the World Bank and the IMF.

It was, of course, Fulbright’s fate to experience the same disappointment and disillusionment that Woodrow Wilson had experienced in 1919 and 1920. In reality, neither FDR nor Harry Truman was committed to internationalism as either Woodrow Wilson or J. William Fulbright defined it. FDR was a devotee of realpolitik. His pet scheme for ensuring peace and prosperity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1. Fulbright’s Liberal Internationalism in Historical Perspective
• Part 2. The Fulbright Exchange in Historical Perspective
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index