A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights - Exploring Global Justice & Policy Reform for International Relations & Political Science Studies

Elizabeth Borgwardt begins A New Deal for the World in August 1941 with President Roosevelt coming aboard HMS Prince of Wales, anchored in Placentia Bay off Newfoundland, for a secret conference with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. At this four-day meeting, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their staffs crafted the United States’ and Great Britain’s vision for a post-war world – the Atlantic Charter. The joint declaration laid out – in eight points – the leaders’ “…national policies…(and) hopes for a better future for the world” (303). Those points echoed chords from FDR’s Four Freedoms speech the previous January (freedom of religion, speech and freedom from want and fear); it affirmed the right of self-determination; it promised free trade, freedom of navigation on the seas, and a continuing peace among nations; and, it called for nations to disarm and abandon the use of force to solve disputes.The charter, Borgwardt suggests, was the foundation for the modern human rights movement. Further, the author contends that since the charter’s guiding principles expressed the vision for the post-war order, then an internationalized New Deal represented the ways and means FDR intended to achieve that vision. Borgwardt’s New Deal argument, told largely from the American point of view, makes perfect sense from the outset. Considering that FDR, an extremely-popular, third-term President and abundantly savvy political operator, would employ a New Deal approach is, for this reader, an inevitable conclusion: Of course he would use a New Deal framework; how else would he do it? Borgwardt supports her New Deal conclusion by arguing that the Atlantic Charter “served as the focal point for free-trade, collective security, and rule of law multilateral institutions -- the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations (UN), and the Nuremburg Tribunals. The President, as “Dr. Win-the-War” used the same medicine “Dr. New Deal” used during the depression (7).Borgwaldt memorializes her point regarding the first formal use of the term human rights by recounting the post-Atlantic Charter efforts by FDR and Churchill. The point of the author’s argument, beyond the use of new terminology, is that human rights imply a significantly expanded universe of what human beings were entitled to and should expect from the governments – the natural rights of man, economic security, civil, political, public and social rights, education, security in old age, et al. Here the British and the American leaders share the credit. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Churchill suggested for a conference in Washington D.C. to formalize war aims of the allied powers and issue a declaration stating why the alliance was fighting the Axis. FDR coined the term United Nations, and Borgwaldt suggests it was FDR’s trusted advisor and Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins who suggested the more expansive definition of what humans should be entitled “simply by virtue of being human” (53).Unlike the bi-lateral Atlantic Charter, the Declaration of the United Nations of 1 January 1942 was a multi-lateral pronouncement signed by 26 nations – the big four warring powers (US, Great Britain, USSR and China), the British Commonwealth nations, the European governments in exile, and India. The declaration’s signatories affirmed the tenants of the Atlantic charter and pledged “…to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world” (55). Borgwaldt rightly acknowledges that determining exactly when certain phraseology comes into common use is an inexact science. In this case, however, the author’s legal training shines through, and her evidence is through and conclusive. I was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.Before beginning the case for the international New Deal, Borgwardt does more foundational work. In a chapter titled The Ghost of Woodrow Wilson, Borgwardt offers a series of four domestic and foreign policy lessons-learned from Wilson’s failed League of Nations efforts. This is thoughtful work and throughout the book, the reader can see the difference between Wilson, the aloof, intellectual, and FDR, the shrewd, highly effective-politician. For example, one lesson was the necessity to acknowledge the political opposition and build consensus. In 1919, Wilson’s signature foreign policy efforts – the Treaty of Versailles and the United States’ participation in the League of Nations – ran into an immovable object in person of Henry Cabot Lodge, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As a result, the United States never signed the Versailles treaty, the nation signed its own peace treaty with the Central Powers, and never joined the League of Nations. Wilson had not accounted for the opposition. FDR, on the other hand, sought the input of prominent political opponents, built coalitions with isolationist and anti-New Deal Republicans, and simply worked the system to get things done. So, instead of immovable objects like Lodge, FDR had powerful Republican Senate committee chairs like Vandenberg and Tobey who supported creation of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations. Borgwaldt is careful to point out that Republican support was not all due to FDR’s charm, and the attack on Pearl Harbor had something to do with Vandenberg’s and Tobey’s change of heart. Borgwaldt’s point, however, it that by heeding the lessons of 1919, FDR succeeded where Wilson failed.Borgwaldt also points out that the difference between Wilson’s failure, and FDR’s success on was simply a sign of the times – in the 1940s the nation was ready for multi-lateral institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the UN and the Nuremburg Charter; in 1919 the nation was not ready for the League of Nations. While this sea change is intuitively obvious in retrospect, given that we have all these institutions, it is not an assertion that easy to document. The author, however, does exactly that: documenting the early efforts of George Gallup on public polling and resurrecting two surveys from Rutgers and Princeton of WWII military veterans. On the issue of efficacy of permanent, multi-lateral institutions to prevent wars and keep the peace, the overwhelming majority of Americans – some as high as 89 percent – supported the United States’ participation in these organizations. As Borgwaldt shows, the New Deal and the war significantly changed the way Americans thought about themselves and the nation’s place in the world.Reading Borgwaldt’s introduction, I immediately asked myself these questions, “What does she mean by an internationalized New Deal? Was she referring to FDR’s leadership style; was it simply the international application of New Deal problem solving; was it his capacity to connect with the average American; was it his aptitude to pick key subordinates and trusted agents to make things happen; was it FDR’s endless enthusiasm and eternal optimism to try big initiatives and then try something else if that did not work; or was it some combination of all the above? In other words, what was the connection between the New Deal and FDR’s vision for the post-war order?” Establishing these terms of reference is key to creating the unmistakable connection between the New Deal of the Great Depression and post WWII.Unfortunately, Borgwaldt misses the boat on this issue. I was counting on seeing some good, old-fashioned, primary-source archival scholarship recounting what Roosevelt’s advisors – Hopkins, Leahy, Stimson, Welles, Stettinius and Morgenthau -- were thinking and saying. The author could have then tracked her own primary source interpretations throughout the meat of the book, recounting evolution of the international New Deal. Instead, the reader is treated to blurbs from secondary sources which do not simply establish this connection. For example, what the heck do Machiavellian, Kantian and Grotian tendencies have to do with FDR’s management style? The author’s argument would have much more powerful had she simply interpreted what FDR’s New Deal principals, or FDR himself, were saying and thinking. This was a miss, and readers are left to establish this New Deal connection for themselves.Borgwaldt then devotes the remaining sections to recounting the diplomatic and political histories of the IMF, World Bank, the UN, and the Nuremburg Charter and tribunals. These are well-documented and highly-readable chronicles which track the grand human rights pronouncements of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Declaration into the multi-lateral institutions that would guarantee those rights. Borgwaldt’s scholarship, chronology, and style are clearly in evidence in these sections. And, I could not help but marvel at the scale and speed with which FDR, his cabinet, and the Congress made big ideas a reality. Borgwaldt illustrates how FDR clearly paid attention to Wilson’s lessons learned. He started planning for post-war peace well before the war ended; he anticipated and accounted for Republican push-back; he implemented multi-lateral solutions which integrated all the elements of national power – diplomatic, economic and military, and his solutions were realistic in scope – “hard-headed realism…and practical progress for the common man” (15). FDR clearly had a sense of the country, the Congress, and the Allies. He knew exactly what he could push hard on, what required a little finesse, and what was a bridge too far. No ideologue, FDR gave ground where it made tactical sense to do so, and he held fast on few strategic principles. Considering the partisan paralysis of the Legislative and the Executive branches these days, Borgwaldt paints a valuable picture of what committed national leaders can accomplish. Finally, and in fairness to the author, Borgwaldt does show flashes of connecting the Depression and the international New Deals. In text-book New Deal problem-solving, American planners for post-war economic aid called for three lines of operation: Relief, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction (118). These were the international equivalent of the 3R’s of the New Deal: Relief, Recovery and Reform.With an eye toward post 9/11 United States, Borgwaldt concludes with a somewhat preachy lecture on the benefits of acting multi-laterally on the international stage. That is a sermon that most Americans are aware of and would agree with – what clear thinking citizen wouldn’t prefer the nation to act in concert with international friends and allies? Borgwardt also suggests a correlation (perhaps she means causation) between unilateralism and a lack of respect for human rights. Using the abuse of Iraqi detainees in 2004 by Army MPs as a bellwether, Borgwaldt suggests this is an indication of a national disregard for human rights. That is a mighty big connection.I suggest there are countless examples throughout the nation’s history where our actions regarding human rights have fallen well-short of our pronouncements. And, whether we were acting multi-laterally or uni-laterally has little to do with it. The key to success on the international stage is setting achievable goals and employing the elements of national power to achieve those goals. No amount of multi-lateralism will accomplish an ill-defined or unrealistic outcome. The real lesson of the nation’s post 9/11 failures in Iraq and Afghanistan is the notion that we can affect a regime change and rebuilt a government in our own image.The lesson I learned from Borgwardt, and she does this masterfully, is the enduring importance of leadership during time of crisis. The nation’s great leaders – when the call comes – have invariably articulated a grand vision that everyone understands and then employed the nation’s ways and means to achieve that vision. Do we often fall short – of course we do. The important thing is we keep moving forward.