The New Globalism: A Vision for America's Role in the World

By Nick Bromell and John Tirman, MIT Center for International Studies. Posted December 11, 2008.

This sharp departure from the New Dealers' intentions, we believe, stems from the irony that the institutions they created were normatively much too weak to manage their own strength. FDR's planners succeeded in vesting them with enormous powers -- money to lend or grant, markets to open, technical expertise, and other financial inducements -- but they did not endow them with an articulated, principled vision to guide them once their post-war reconstruction mission was largely achieved.

Their failure to provide such a vision may be traced to two sources: First, in the moment these institutions were created, the case for multilateralism was almost too easy to make. New Dealers had only to point the failures of Versailles that had led to the global Depression and to the rise of fascism. But there was a second reason as well, and one with particular significance for liberal Democrats today. New Dealers tended to justify these new institutions almost exclusively in terms of their new understanding of self-interest: what was good for the world was good for America. At no time did FDR or any of his top advisers step forward with the kind of powerful, values-laden explanation for these institutions that FDR had provided earlier (in his second inaugural address, for example) to explain the domestic New Deal agenda. Ever since, with the possible exception of John F. Kennedy, liberal Democrats have been far more willing to articulate the values of their domestic programs than of their foreign policies. This is why their liberal internationalism so easily slid into conservative internationalism.

Reasserting Liberal Internationalism in 2009

It should now be clear that the Bush agenda has been Wilsonian only in a superficial and highly misleading sense: it has adopted policy objectives shared by liberal internationalism -- "democratization" in particular -- but it has done so without adopting the liberal principles and values that would justify those objectives. The Bush unilateral agenda is driven by fear, not a sense of trust in others; by a conviction that the American way is the only way, not a broad-minded respect for varying values; by a narrow faith that individual freedom can be promoted only when individuals pursue their self-interest in a free market, not when they collectively deliberate on the public good.

To take full advantage of Bush -- and conservatism's -- poor performance, Obama and his team should offer Americans a compelling foreign policy vision of their own. This means articulating in persuasive terms the liberal values they would have their policies further. It also means learning from the success, and the failures, of the liberal internationalist tradition as a whole. Consider again the two policy areas of liberalism's approach to human rights and its commitment to economic equity as a means of promoting global economic stability.

Liberalism's democratic rights agenda (including human rights, as embodied in the 1948 U.N. Declaration) was, as noted, powerful as a set of normative ideas, but it has been weakly institutionalized. Conversely, liberalism's economic equity agenda -- the "New Deal for the World" -- has enjoyed extraordinary institutional power, but it was normatively stunted. A reasonable yet exciting agenda for Obama, then, would be to address these flaws and regenerate the best of the liberal tradition.

A reinvigorated liberal approach to human rights, for example, would strengthen non-coercive and consensual mechanisms to realize those rights. With Bush's unilateralism bogged down in Iraq, Americans are poised to appreciate anew the virtues of multilateralism, diplomacy, negotiation, flexibility, open-minded dialogue with hostile states and other expressions of the liberal temperament in foreign affairs. Americans are also ready to embrace, as a primary objective of U.S. foreign policy, the universal recognition of human rights -- among Saudis and Chinese as well as Iranians and Cubans. This willingness would extend to enforcement by multilateral means -- notably, through the International Criminal Court (ICC), created in 1998 and joined by 105 countries, but not the United States. The ICC is gradually proving its mettle as an important symbol of global justice and as an institution that can enforce a multilaterally conceived human rights agenda.

Obama could also advance human rights by supporting "substate" cooperation -- such as associations of jurists who convene to share ideas and practice. Another approach is to encourage "human security" through rule of law policies in foreign assistance, multilateral loan making, and the like, which gives more weight to the protection of human rights, for example, and obsesses a bit less about property rights. And, needless to say, Obama must follow through on his pledge to end the U.S. practices that are outright violations of basic rights -- Guantanamo detainees, renditions, torture, and the like.

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John Tirman is Executive Director of MIT's Center for International Studies.

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