A New Deal For The World by Elizabeth Burkhardt

Introduction:
Elizabeth Burkhardt believes the American government's experience tackling domestic economic issues through government intervention provided the impetus for its decision in 1941 to construct a postwar world governed by international institutions and laws established under the premises of universal human rights. Calling the departure from isolationism a "revolutionary" development, Roosevelt's commitment to a liberal democratic world order only makes sense when understood in the context of American political and economic developments in the 1930s.
The United States would stand for stabilizing and coordinating international currency, economic development, international justice, freer trade, self-determination, social welfare, and a permanent system of general collective security. Its concern with individuals ahead of state interests and a world transcending the economic and political condition that provoked previous global conflicts marked a transformitive moment in the history of human rights and America's national identity.
Historiographically speaking, Burkhardt places her work in the realm of the new international histories concerned with employing concepts from international law, relations, and economics to seemingly insular political development. She places herself in contrast to the 1960s school that sought to explain American involvement in international politics as merely an embedding of national interest in international institutions. Thus far, she concludes the United States had a philosophical and ideological connection to the new world order.The Ghost of Woodrow Wilson:
The failure to keep the peace following World War I loomed over policymakers during the Second World War. Though unamitity eluded planners, almost all high level players agreed that co-opting future domestic resistance through early participation in a lengthy process that sought to integrate political and economic security with international regulations on trade, finance, and labor in a realistic scheme mindful of the unchanging imperfections of human nature. In other words, the United States had more to gain than to lose through participation in a new world order.
With Great Britain fighting a lonely battle through the bleak years of 1940 and 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt strove to provide the island all the resources it could without committing political suicide at home while moving the American public to accept that U.S. diplomacy and national interests could be considered idealisitc as well as hard-headed while setting the record straight for the world that America believed in international law as well as moral and human decency. In crafting the Atlantic Charter with Churchill, the editions to the original draft reveal the president's political acumen trumping his idealism and the prime minister's dexerity at protecting vested British interests. Under close scrutiny, the Atlantic Charter's principles appear less the product of enlightened consensus on postwar order than a propaganda piece crafted to fulfill the immediate needs of two statesmen.
Yet the Atlantic Charter was also the first official statement issued by the American people outlining the war's aims and the shape of the postwar outcome. Some read it as a blueprint for the institutionalization of universal human rights, others an extension of free trade and New Deal principles across the world, still others a strong anti-imperialist message. At the very least it represented a real and symbolic expansion of the U.S. national interest and a rearrangment of conceptions and ideas. At the most, it followed the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address in recasting the aims of the Allied war effort to an abstract ideal society that animated policythinking across the globe in the six decades since.
Forging a New American Multilateralism:
States must provide subsistence to those on the margins of society, not only for moral reasons, but because international security rested upon the eradication of the demogougey fueled by depression and privation that propelled the fascists and communists into power. So President Roosevelt and his supporters in the press and academia concluded.
Encounters with totalitarianism necessitated the elevation of human dignity and life, at least life after physical birth, as outside the jurisdiction of positive international law. Previous conceptions of human rights focused on narrow domestic restraints on governmental authority now morphed into an international creed devoted to providing for what Roosevelt considered the fundamental requirements for freedom. Roosevelt's legalism and institutional problem-solving structures were rooted in older ideologies only gaining wide currency in policy-making circles following the failures of moralism and isolationsim. 1930s New Dealers convinced their efforts to reform America through an activist regulatory state projected this philosophy onto international relations in the 1940s. Rejecting Wilsonian perfectionism, the men occupying key posts were still predisposed to believe their plans for reshaping the world through legal institutions that elevated human rights as the end goal of any state policy. The individual, rather than the state, now became the ultiamte object of protection by the international community.
Key for Burkhardt's understanding of the evolution of nascent internationalism is its connection with the ideology of the New Deal: to separate an evolution of foreign policy thinking from a transformitive moment in American domestic politics would be an error. The New Deal for the rest of the world rested on two assumptions: all human beings are entitled to freedom from oppression by virtue of their humanity and that individuals could be held responsible for acts committed by the name of the state during war. Of course, no one ideology hold sway over all of American policy and the genesis of modern human rights thinking has diverse and interrelated roots. The political resistance to an interventionist foreign policy also lessened as a new generation of Americans reared in the Depression and tempered by war were not constrained by their forebearers parochialism.
Bretton Woods, 1944: The Perils of Economic Planning:
A postwar economic order established by the United States would revolve around stability. Freer trade, freely convertablie currencies, and reconstruction projects not unduly hampered by wartime debts were the economic ingredients for a more prosperous and stable international system. While reliant on Keynesian theory, it had to be packaged in such a way to command domestic support. Yet technical debates over monetary policy were not closely scrutinized by the public or partisans, a fact that Burkhardt believes ensured their passage.
A prisoner's dilemma emerged in the realm of international finance following the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression. Bretton Woods was an attempt by the United States to ensure currency manipulation and tariff barriers would never again prolong a recession. Reformers schooled in the Progressive Era and New Deal, organizing the economy into a deliberate process of institutional change carried these conceptions into international relations.
Harry White and John Maynard Keyes led the American and British postwar planning respectively. Handicapped by an interventonist United States Senate, White committed the United States to a form of internationalism that would spread responsible capitalism aborad and render the dollar supreme where Keynes sought to compensate Britian in spite of its economic power.
Bretton Woods: Investing in Global Stability:
In June 1944, British and American delegates at the Bretton Woods conference set out to synthesize American and British proposals on currency stability programs and whip the other allies into line. Their postwar vision of international finance rested on an international monetary mechanism that would encourage trade by making currencies exchangable at stable rates while making short-term credit available with the focus of rebuilding Europe. Broad principles, however, were not easily translated into policy, as previous attempts at coordinating the redistribution of food to impoverished nations illuminated.
The IMF would administer a code of conduct regarding exchange rate policies that would make international transactions more predictible and shelter domestic problems aimed at full employment and expansive social programs. The debate at Bretton Woods surrounded who would contribute how much and on what terms would that money be made available, the extent members would alter currency rates to permit a certain level of flexibility. Trading nations and businesses wanted predictability and systemic stability, but a weak economy would want to devalue its currency to shore up its export industry, which Americans assigned as the source of the Depression. On the issue of contributions, the United States maintained it should possess the lion's share, which would afford it a greater capacity for directing the fund afterwards.
The World Bank would abet the mobilization of economic resources for longterm reconstruction and development projects for projects and regions private capital neglect. Engaged less in direct lending than guaranteeing loans so as to encourage private investment. Other considerations hampered its ability to serve as an independent lender.
While the Roosevelt Administration championed the Bretton Woods agreement as an opportunity to spread economic freedoms and prosperity across the globe while protecting American laborers from international financial conditions by providing an institutions where the United States could impose its will, isolationists attacked it as contrary to the spirit of the Constitution. The mix of American idealism and power in economic affairs was an unprecedented occurence: its survival in the House and Senate rested upon the prevailing internationalist settlement following the conclusion of the war and the apathy a majority of Americans possessed in considering its appeals. Americans believed they were investing in global peace, prosperity, and stability: Roosevelt saw dispensing sovereignty across multinational institutions as part and process of participating in a functioning international system.
Rather than simply providing freedom from fear, internationalism provided an opportunity for augmenting the happiness of the world and the development of the human personality.
Burkhardt sets herself apart from historians who claim the outbreak of the war marked the end of the New Deal. By the late 1940s, a backlash against the New Deal and state interventionism caused the economic, social, and cultural rights extoled earlier to recede into oblivion. As the realities of the war merged with the maturing New Deal consciousness, Roosevelt sought to internationalize his accomplishments at home through the mobilization of the state's resources to preserve peace and open up greater areas of the world for peaceful advancement into prosperity. Unattained ideological goals enshrined in Roosevelt's planning documents should not be ignored by political and economic historians as irrelevant to the study of his policy.
She provides a backhanded compliment to the advocate scholars in the field of human rights, who in their zeal for expanding the realm of interventionism even further into private society, the dialogue becomes abstract and distanced from historical reality, and hence irrelevant in expanding the limits of knowledge. Burkhardt also worries contemporary debates cannot reconcile non-Western conceptions of "human rights" with the traditional model. Imaginative distance from the subjects under historical evaluation is a prerequisite for a narrative exhibiting deference to the forces contingency in the development of the doctrine. Rather than ransacking the past for familiar sounding concepts, context is necessary for understanding any event's role in the process of historical progress. A historical approach, rather than legal, political, philosophical, or sociological, best sheds light on the novelty of Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter in American political discourse.
The Chimera of Collective Security:
Postwar peace planners believed setting in motion a process an American-led commission composed of apolitical experts aiming to separate the peace treaty from the machinery of collective security while hostilities are still ongoing promised the best solution for a lasting peace. The draft emerging for the initial U.N. Charter in 1944 reflected the principles of the Atlantic Charter and a heightened awareness of the relationship of public awareness to the perpetuation of human rights.
American policymakers crafting the U.N. Charter never lost sight of Wilson's failure to reconcile foreign policy with powerful anti-imperial and anti-multilateral strains of domestic thought and the structural flaws in the League of Nation that impeded effective action.
At the Dumbarton Oaks conference, the scope over veto-power and the voting process on the security council provoked the greatest friction, with the Soviets joined other countries in objecting to America's proposed proportional voting system on financial matters on the grounds such a system would lead to yankee hegenomy. American proposals to support human rights abroad encounter resistance from the British and Soviets, the latter of whom were determined to limit the powers of the body to issues of peace and security with minimal pretexts for interference in domestic policy. In other words, no state decided to entrust its interests to the whims of an international body, and the postwar order would revolve around the power politics of 1945 rather than abstract moral or legal principles.
Learning to Work Together by Working Together:
A lack of literary flourish and details in the Dumbarton Oaks draft deflated idealist dreams, but the proposal for a U.N. Security Council committed to combating aggression and an international criminal court were applauded as steps in the right direction by internventionists. Americans worried over the yet undetermined voting procedures in the Security Council and the implications of force commitments on American political institutions. Small states clamored for greater recognition and a more formal commitment to individual rights as previously articulated in the Atlantic Charter.
Negotiations with the Soviets as the war in Europe came to a close proved vexing for Roosevelt. Power realities in Eastern Europe compromised any American hopes that Stalin possessed any incentive to cooperate along an internationalist perspective against his own interest. Indeed, the United States also behaved in a manner at variance with the principles of self-determination in the Atlantic Charter in promising the Soviets territory in exchange for an attack on Japan. More concerned with Soviet participation in a worldwide body, the dying Roosevelt placed the United Nations ahead of other political and diplomatic considerations.
Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, remained committed to the U.N. and the Conference on International Organization opened on April 25. Friction over veto as an agenda setter evaporated after the Allies bonded againt Soviet intransigence. Smaller nations succeeded in reducing the discretionary powers of the Security Council and the addition of human rights language that still contradicted language on sovereignty and self-defense.
Human rights activists protested the distance between lofty commitments to self-determination, individual rights, and social progress and reality in the Charter's revamped preamble. The presence of language committing the United Nations to equal rights, self-determination, human rights, and fundamental freedoms including language and religion and ends to discrimination on racial and sexual lines marked a vast change from the technical document produced by the legal experts and policy wonks at Dumbarton Oaks.
Policy concerns again superseded ideological ones. The U.S. refused to allow any outside interference with its freshly acquired territories in the Pacific, Colonial powers were clearly uneasy over any timetable to relinquish their possessions: language promising eventual independence for all territories was scrapped from the Charter. Deference to domestic autonomy absent a threat to international peace, ambiguities in the nature of enforcement, self-defense, and the nature of human rights themselves were also the product of political realities of the time.
Nuremburg 1945: The Limits of Law:
Nazis were tried with four major crimes: planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of war of aggression, the commission of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The final count was the most innovative and the product of a merging of ideas, politics, and institutions that drove America to abandon its traditional perogatives and the potential its power provided in favor of mulitlateral solutions. Could individual guilt be established for a state's actions in committing war and crimes and could Germans be prosecuted for crimes against Jews and others before the war began.
Dismissing accusations of victor's justice, Americans hoped a trial would serve an educational function for the German public while providing the world an example of a new world order. The laws lie in context of Allied policy toward Germany, outlaw aggressive war, bring opporbrium and attention to crimes against humanity, and was constructed upon exisiting treaty laws. It also fucntioned as the source of future international courts and annihilate forever fear of aggressive war.
Inside the Executive Department, State, Treasury, and War proposed radically different plans for postwar Germany reflecting a diversity of thought over future American interests in the region. State wanted a strong German state in central Europe economically integrated with the West to stand as a bulwark against Communism, War wanted to maintain much of the German apparatus to ensure a speedy and efficient transition, while Treasury endorsed laying waste to the industrial capacity of Germany, rendering the most powerful state in Europe an agricultural pygmy lacking the capacity or mindset to wage aggressive war.
The latter approach apparently was Roosevelt's personal preference and the grand nature of the reconstruction of a nation by outside agents echoed New Deal reformist motifs. Worries over the collapse of the German economy worried Morganthau's understudies and Secretary of War Henry Stimpson rightfully contended the destruction of a nation violated the Atlantic Charter. Domestic political opinion moved against Morgenthau's proposal, forcing Roosevelt to disown it before the election. By May 1945, the United States accepted the necessity of an ordered German society with a vibrant economy providing a buffer against further Communist encroachment as an overriding national interest, though denazification programs and the destruction of the German military played a serious role in the occupation agenda.
Trials for Nazi leaders were designed to enshrine the principle that wars waged unjustly were a crime. International law protects states and individuals in most circumstances from being subject to answering for actions conducted during war, but the Nazis were out of control in World War II and forfeited their right to protection through atrocious actions.
Internationalizing New Deal Justice:
Although aware of Nazi policies toward P.O.Ws and the Holcaust, their greatest sin in the eyes of American policymakers was drawing the Allies into a ruinous war. Robert Jackson and his fellow New Dealers entered Nuremburg believing they possessed a mandate and the capacity for using the trial to alter forever the great power struggle. While prosecuting the Nazis for aggressive war was a given, finding a way for guilt to be assigned for the Holocaust and other transgressions proved more difficult from a legal standpoint as no international law dealt with extermination and mass murder. Broad language in the Hague Convention abetted their efforts, as did the decision to make the customs of justice applicable as well. Wary of expanding the powers of the international tribunal to German actions against German nationals prior to 1939, the Court limited its jurisdiction.
For its critics, the Nuremburg Trial's focus on crimes against peace was merely a reflection of status quoism while another batch of military men worried the focus on individual responsibility for soldiers obeying orders set a dangerous precedent, especially as the United States, in defeating the Axis, targeted civilians in carpet bombing missions and used the atomic bomb.
If Nuremburg was animated by American production, it is one improbable to emerge from the United States outside of 1945. The emerging mulitlateralist sensibility that sought to ensure peace and prosperity around the world through international institutions. More than simply prosecuting crimes, the Nuremburg Trials were a projection of the New World Order that justified the sacrifices of wartime and whose establishment, reckoning with precedent, and aims bore resemblence with other New Deal programs synthesizing legalism with moralism.
The Nuremburg Trials embodied the first institutionalized, multilateral to use the ideals of the rule of law to give voice to the moral intuition that individuals composing the univere are entitled to equal moral consideration. It legitimized the idea of individual responsibility for crimes against international law, jurisprudential underpinning of the dignity of the individual irrespecitve of local, domestic laws, and an example of the importance of documenting and narrating the specifics of atrocities to creae a detailed and enduring record while moving the yardstick of human rights law toward the protetion of individuals.
No judicial system in a transistional political period can escape social understandings of previous injustice.
Forgotten Legacies of the Atlantic Charter:
History too often makes the Atlantic Charter moment an aberration in a larger Cold War history. Burkhardt proposes a counternarrative of the importance of institutions established in the period for providing the United States the capacity to last through the Cold War. The United States volunatarily constrained its influence through instituional channels and consolidating consent for international order. The Cold War thus becomes the bipolar abberation.
The World Bank and IMF became another Cold War arena or promoting anti-Soviet ideologies for monetary trade, finance, and developmental policies.
F.D.R. succeeded in altering the fundamental concept of government and its obligations to the governed and established a change in attitudes worldwide toward economic stability and the responsibility of the great powers to achieve it.
The U.N. and Nuremburg Trials rhetorically and symbolically puts human rights violators on the permanent defensive and deprives the world of impunity.
Political, legal, and economic developmets indivisibly contributed to the nation's security. An ideological mindset or a similiarly pragmatic approach?
Last Chapter = Annoying
Recapitulating her earlier points and the arguments of other scholars vis-a-vis the importance of the "Zeitgeist of 1945" in altering how Americans concieved of their world, namely, that Americans, in the aftermath of World War II and the Great Depression, were willing to endorse Roosevelt's multilateral schemes as sound policy decisions and that individual human rights deserved protection.
She then rails globalization cheerleaders, sneers at the realists and neoconservatives and contends that because the United States encountered unforeseen difficulties overruning Iraq, it must therefore bow to whim of a global test and submit the implementation of its foreign policy to conditions of human rights. She never argues how multilateralism would aid the United States achieve its objectives abroad, save perhaps as a guard against overextension and make the Europeans like us more, as if the realities of 1945 should instruct us in how to understand those of 2008.