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 is the liberalism we associate with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. It represents a disposition, or temperament, as much as it signifies particular policy priorities. To balance individual freedom with a sense of collective responsibility for the public good, it values a generous broad-mindedness that encourages citizens to see matters from various points of view, to stand in each other's shoes, and to govern themselves through reasoned deliberation rather than submission to a set of fixed rules. While conservatives attack this disposition as "relativism" and "weakness," liberals experience it as strength of character. It takes strength, they argue, to be willing to be flexible, to be generous and open-minded, to listen to others, and to trust others enough to engage in the enterprise of self-governance and mutual problem-solving with them.

Liberalism's critics (Marxists on the left, conservatives on the right) argue that the liberal synthesis of values is at best a fragile compromise always at risk of coming undone, and at worst a self-contradictory fraud. The value of their critique is that it reminds us that liberalism is a history not of genial consensus but of continuous dialectical struggle: its libertarian freedom-from-restriction side clashes with its broad-minded empathy-with-others side. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin neatly described these two strains of twentieth-century liberalism in terms of "two concepts of liberty," a negative freedom from constraints and a positive freedom to work toward the realization of human dignity for all persons.

The Invention of Liberal Internationalism

Woodrow Wilson was the first president to forge a foreign policy strongly inflected by these liberal values. In contrast both to America's longstanding isolationism and Theodore Roosevelt's imperialism, Wilson's policies after the First World War took the point-of-view of colonized peoples and explicitly asserted their right to seek autonomy and self-determination from European and other imperial nations, just as the American colonies had asserted their rights some 150 years earlier. Implicit in this defense of national self-governance were the liberal ideals of individual rights and freedoms underwritten by faith in the ability of all peoples to govern themselves.

Just as importantly, Wilson urged the United States and its allies to promote such ideals actively, by intervention and through international institutions. The notion that the United States should play a constructive leadership role in a world that had been dominated and grossly mismanaged by monopolistic practices of the Great Powers powerfully resonated with progressive ideas about the role of government in domestic affairs. Finally, the idea of a League of Nations that would seek to resolve national differences before they erupted into armed conflict was also an expression of liberalism's optimistic faith in the possibility of cooperative, rational solutions to human problems.

The second great contribution to liberal internationalism came from Wilson's secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who followed Wilson to the White House by twelve years and was commander-in-chief during the next world war. FDR's ideas, like Wilson's, were forged by postwar necessity to reshape a world altered forever by a global conflagration. FDR answered in much the same spirit as Wilson, but he could also argue from concrete historical example: the allied powers' failure after the First World War to implement fully the liberal principles and policies Wilson had pushed for and their reliance instead on mean-spirited punitive measures toward Germany had clearly had disastrous consequences. This Second World War had to be concluded more successfully than the first.

Roosevelt thus spurred the creation not only of the United Nations, but of the Bretton Woods institutions that would offer a "New Deal for the World." Drawing on Keynesian economics, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were forged in a spirit of generosity and conciliation; they were intended to help reconstruct war-ravaged countries and provide economic stability worldwide. The New Deal designers of the postwar world also founded key humanitarian agencies such as the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, creating the means to enact FDR's "freedom from want." Doing so multilaterally, with the significant participation of all the great powers and indeed of every country in the world, ensured both the legitimacy and efficiency of this remarkably ambitious enterprise.

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

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