Elizabeth Borgwardt's A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights

...These rights included employment, housing, health care, education, and a decent standard of living...

...The impulse at work here was not a selfless American altruism but a conviction, learned at home in the face of the Great Depression, of the inextricability of national security, economic stability, and a measure of social justice for all...

...And rather than seeing wartime U.S...

...Borgwardt is too good a historian not to see the warts on the practical implementation of the global New Deal, and she lays them open to view...

...That is, she sees in these speeches not only the promise of a bigger and better New Deal for Americans but a New Deal for the world...

...In the 1940s, it was liberal Democrats, not conservative Republicans, who held the high ground coupling national security and the missionary impulse to spread freedom abroad...

...HONEST THOUGH she is in acknowledging the shortcomings of New Deal globalism, Borgwardt cannot bring herself to admit that by the 1940s the New Deal had pretty much run out of gas, let alone that its commitment to social citizenship had never been quite as thoroughgoing as she suggests...

...and the Nuremberg Charter that governed the war crimes trial of leading Nazis in 1945-1946...

...In the Senate, it was Robert Wagner, not Hillary Rodham Clinton, who strode the halls of power on behalf of New York and the nation...

...HERS IS NOT AN altogether new way of looking at things...

...Borgwardt concludes, a 'bit too bashfully for my taste, with some worried remarks about the recent supplanting in Bush administration foreign policy of a rhetorical nexus of multilateralism and human rights with "an axis linking unilateralism with a lack of respect for human rights" [emphasis in original...

...Recently, Cass Sunstein declared FDR's second address, the "greatest speech of the twentieth century," and called upon fellow liberals to complete the "unfinished revolution" that it forecast...

...Borgwardt admits that Americans were slow to grasp the social-democratic subtext of the Atlantic Charter or the virtues of a foreign policy modeled on what Henry Morgenthau scornfully termed "a nice WPA job...

...Of particular moment for nostalgic liberals are two of Roosevelt's speeches...

...Even if one is more skeptical than Borgwardt about the rewards of a global New Deal married to American hegemony, it is hard not to agree that the prospect it afforded was a good deal brighter than our own...

...At the same time, these leaders struggled valiantly to sustain an American-style social democracy against a resurgent, reactionary domestic opposition...

...just as a society needed to 'spend to save' at home—to reflate its economy in order to protect priorities such as domestic employment—so, too, powerful states had to 'give to get' in order to garner the benefits of a stable international system, by spreading not just resources but also decision-making authority around, at least a little bit...

...foreign policy (as many have) through the distorting and anachronistic lens of the cold war that followed, Borgwardt contends that it is more apt to view 124 DISSENT / Summer 2006 it as an attempt at the internationalization of this domestic reform regime that preceded it...

...Then, they recall warmly, the country waged good wars against totalitarian enemies under iconic liberal Democratic presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman...

...the 1945 United Nations Charter and the subsequent UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948...

...Documents such as those she surveys may often be "toothless," she admits, but they were "toothless in the way the Declaration of Independence is toothless—unenforceable in any court of law but having a moral, cultural, and even political grip that resisted attempts by the great powers, especially the United States and the USSR, to wriggle free...

...Moreover, this move left in limbo the Charter's apparent international protections for individuals from the human rights abuses of their own state, which was fine with many Americans worried about the threat such protections might pose for such domestic folkways as racial lynching...

...In much the same spirit, Elizabeth Borgwardt's fine book is a tribute to the Atlantic Charter and its consequences, as well as an effort to see the two speeches as of a piece—a single plea for human rights at home and abroad that put particular emphasis on the "social rights" implied by freedom from want and fear...

...ROBERT WESTBROOK is the author, most recently, of Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth...

...Mandela and many like him were drawn, as Borgwardt says, by the implication in the Atlantic Charter that individual human dignity was not solely dependent on sovereign states but could appeal to a set of supranational moral and legal norms...

...At Bretton Woods, American negotiator Harry Dexter White and his British counterpart John Maynard Keynes, hammered out a system of international monetary control and development banking that aimed to stabilize international markets, while at the same time protecting domestic programs aimed at full employment and social welfare...

...By her lights, the New Deal was an effort by liberals led by FDR not only to save capitalism from itself and to provide Americans with relief from the devastating economic crisis of the Great Depression but also, and above all, to put into place a set of government regulatory institutions that would provide for long-term social and economic security...

...True enough...

...The great powers, including the United States, created a UN Charter that only modestly conceded ground to Atlantic Charter principles of human rights and selfdetermination —particularly when it came to the treatment of dependent territories, such as those in the Pacific that the United States had taken from the Japanese...

...One might say that the domestic New Dealers were prepared to seek just so much social and economic security for the disadvantaged as stability and saving capitalism from the capitalists required, and the international New Dealers were prepared to grant just so much international regulation, multilateralism, and human rights as were consistent with a preponderance of American power...

...At least the mandated territories could not be used for military purposes...

...For example, American negotiators at Bretton Woods often appeared less interested in insuring mutual freedom from want than in cracking open British imperial markets for American business...

...Just as capitalists had to cede authority to a regulatory state in order to pull the American economy out of the depression, so the United States had to tether itself to international regulatory institutions if it was to assure itself of peace and prosperity in the wake of the war's devastation...

...The second speech is FDR's January 1944 State of the Union address in which he called for an "economic bill of rights" in which "a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all...

...But if one is going to take heart in the work of American policymakers in the 1940s, as Borgwardt clearly wants us to do, one might hope to be satisfied with more than the unintended consequences of their rhetoric, with more than the ironic restraints they built for themselves...

...Borgwardt's interpretation thus rests on a conventional reading of the intentions and accomplishments of the New Deal and on a more original interpretation of the intentions and accomplishments of American foreign policy during and immediately after World War II...

...The most popular representation of freedom from want was Norman Rockwell's self-satisfied painting of the Thanksgiving feast of a prosperous white, middle-class family...

...Borgwardt argues that Americans supported Roosevelt's foreign policy because it mirrored the New Deal, but neglects the fact that many did so in spite of this resemblance...

...It has been advanced before by social scientists such as Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Ikenberry...

...One has to credit their intentions and practical achievements as well, and here Borgwardt seems to me too ready to apply a coat of makeup to the warts she astutely observes and give Roosevelt and his advisers the benefit of the doubt...

...Throughout she makes reference to what she calls "Mandela's Atlantic Charter," by which she means the ironic way in which Roosevelt's embrace of the Four Freedoms could escape his limited intentions (let alone Churchill's) and provide a powerful mandate for activists such as Nelson Mandela, who was a young South African lawyer in 1941 and was 126 DISSENT / Summer 2006 so moved by the Atlantic Charter that he incorporated it into the charter of the African National Congress...

...And at home, instead of lamely fighting a losing battle against tax cuts for the wealthy and spending cuts for the poor, liberals boldly called for a broader "social citizenship" that would extend the New Deal and provide a fuller measure of security for all Americans...

...DISSENT / Summer 2006 127...

...But these days, embattled liberals would settle for a quarter-loaf, and so the rhetoric, and even the achievements, of the 1940s understandably loom large...

...The Nuremberg trials subordinated the charge of "crimes against humanity" to that of "waging aggressive war," which let the Nazis off the DISSENT / Summer 2006 125 hook for their treatment of their German victims before the war began and cast the Holocaust within an instrumental frame that obscured its full horror...

...Discontent with the regulatory state was high during the war, fueled not only by unhappiness with the management of the wartime economy ("the mess in Washington") but also by the pall that had been cast over state power by "collectivist" enemies...

...Furthermore, it was dead on arrival in the face of the opposition of the powerful conservative coalition in Congress that had steadily grown in power since 1938 and the consequent depletion of Roosevelt's political capital...

...FDR's 1944 "economic bill of rights" was, more than anything else, a reminder of how much the New Deal had left undone at home by way of providing social and economic security...

...To be sure, Borgwardt readily grants that the New Deal at home and abroad was, in William Leuchtenberg's phrase, but a "halfway revolution...

...Beginning with a vivid account of the formulation of the Atlantic Charter off the coast of Newfoundland in August 1941, she proceeds to the story of three further multilateral "charters" that sought to embody and develop its principles: the 1944 Bretton Woods agreements that established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank...

...As Borgwardt says, "From a human rights point of view, the UN trusteeship regime was arguably a step backward from the League of Nations' system of mandates...

...But Borgwardt's is the fullest development of the argument and one graced by her narrative skill, as well as a historian's eye for the telling anecdote...

...In a January 1941 address to Congress, he looked forward to "a world founded upon four essential human freedoms": freedom of speech and of religious worship and freedom from want and from fear...

...Yet Borgwardt insists on the power of rhetoric alone...

...In both speeches, FDR firmly held to the conviction that "freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere...

...And the Nuremberg Charter not only charged the Nazis with conventional war crimes but brought them before a multinational bar of justice for a conspiracy to wage aggressive war and commit extraordinary "crimes against humanity" In each of these instances, Borgwardt says, "America's multilateralist moment amounted to a kind of global Keynesianism...

...The WPA itself had finally died its lingering death in 1942...

...The UN Charter, though loaded with reservations and qualifications protective of national sovereignty and great power domination, did manage to institute a measure of collective security and eventually to include within its purview a defense of "the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small...

...Pursuit of these four freedoms was incorporated months later into the Atlantic Charter, an informal proclamation of shared purpose in the face of Nazi tyranny issued by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill...

...This rhetorical, "aspirational" charter "helped to generate powerful and ultimately transformative, expectations in constituencies far from Roosevelt's and Churchill's targets, such as subjects of colonial regimes the world over, as well as African-American communities and a variety of nongovernmental organizations in the United States...

...Nonetheless, this seems to me too generous an estimate by half...

...Insightful as it is to point up the continuities between Roosevelt's domestic and foreign policies, the global New Deal was no more robust in 1945 than its domestic counterpart, and it would thereafter suffer from its own frailties as well as from the onset of the cold war...

...As she puts it, the rhetoric of the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter "transformed the domestic New Deal into an Allied fighting faith...

...In each instance, Borgwardt contends, these charters can best be seen not simply as an assertion of American power but also as the manifestation of a willingness to limit that power to some extent by embedding it in multilateral institutions that would regulate the world in the interests of a more widespread political and economic security, as well as individual human rights...