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.

What made Roosevelt's foreign policy liberal was his conviction that the solution to certain problems simply could not be left to the operations of the free market; instead, the power of states, democratically convened, could and should be brought to bear upon them. This reliance on the power of a democratically elected government expressed strong faith also in the wisdom of the people themselves. Finally, Roosevelt's policies were pragmatic and flexible; they embodied a predisposition that was broad-minded not narrow, loose not strict, generous not mean. His multilateralism expressed confidence in the possibility -- indeed, the necessity -- of a world community based upon such principles and values. His New Deal for the world, like the New Deal at home, was rooted in "love, faith, hope, and charity," in a deep sense of human interdependency that had as much to do with the bonds of affection and reciprocity as with self-interest narrowly construed.

At the close of the Bretton Woods Conference, Hans Morgenthau summed up the administration's position in unequivocally multilateralist terms: "We have come to recognize that the wisest and most effective way to protect our national interests is through international cooperation -- that is to say, through united effort for the attainment of common goals." This emphasis on "cooperation" and "common goals" strongly implied another value -- fairness, or justice, understood as an equitable distribution of wealth and goods. As historian Elizabeth Borgwardt has written, Roosevelt's was "a vision of the individual as the ultimate object of protection by the international community, with individuals in turn having responsibilities to that community." That is the liberal synthesis, and paradox, in a nutshell.

How Well Have Liberal Policies Performed?

If these are the broad liberal values and commitments that underlie the liberal internationalist foreign policy tradition, liberals still have to ask why some of their policies have fallen short, and how they can design new policies that more effectively further their liberal principles. We will briefly examine just two policy areas -- human rights and economic equity -- which are illustrative of the challenges Obama will face.

The liberal tradition promoting political rights has a weak pedigree with respect to performance. While liberals formally adopted self-government and democratic rights as legitimate for all, and embraced the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, it took civil society organizations, notably Amnesty International, to make human rights the hot button issue it has been for the last four decades. Why?

Democratic rights have been difficult to implant because shifts in the form of political power, typically necessary to enact human rights broadly, involve losses by the currently powerful in any given state. The human rights agenda -- political freedoms, in the American idiom, but for many throughout the world, economic rights as well -- has also met with resistance on cultural grounds. But the multilateral institutions designed by FDR were not given the powers to interfere in the domestic affairs of individual states, much less in their belief systems. Consequently, liberal human rights advocates have richly articulated their values, but they have lacked the muscle to back them up. Liberal human rights policies have been normatively robust but institutionally weak.

Liberals should take note that the outcome of FDR's multilateralism also has been mixed. It has worked reasonably well in the less visible agencies responsible for health, standard setting, and other areas, but the powerful multilateral agencies spawned by the Bretton Woods agreements have significantly failed to live up to their implied liberal principles. As development agencies, and following their immediate postwar successes, the World Bank and IMF did well when they allowed Third World countries to innovate with a mix of markets and government intervention in national economies, often with loans or other kinds of assistance. But this success ran afoul of ideology: liberalism's fragile balance of positive and negative liberties was all-too-easily overcome by Margaret Thatcher's and Ronald Reagan's narrow commitment to negative liberty only. The New Dealers' goal of state-led economic development, for example, has been abandoned in favor of Friedmanite policies to abolish government subsidies and constraints on free economic activity, whether through taxation, trade tariffs or quotas, state-run industries, or full employment policies. These free-market schemes not only failed to produce the results the earlier, mixed model achieved, but have stirred emigration, more corruption, widespread impoverishment, and social and ethnic conflict. The "New Deal for the World" became simply a good deal for transnational corporations.

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

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