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

This is a very informative book. It places a Weberian emphasis on the importance of ideas to the unfolding of history. Borwardt's writing style makes her text and arguments accessible to a wide readership. Students of international relations and global governance will find the treasure trove of information in this text particularly useful, and its argument thought-provoking.

The thrust of Borgwardt's thesis is that, for a brief period in the 1940s, the world had a "multilateralist moment" in which there was an outpouring of enthusiasm, especially in the United States, for multilateralism, conditioned by the prominence of the ideology of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal". She contends that the trauma of the Great Depression had convinced sufficiently large numbers of Americans that governmental institutions had a role to play in upholding the rights - including the economic rights - of individuals and that this lesson was extrapolated to the international context by the onset of the Second World War. If institutional intervention at home was necessary to maintain domestic security (especially from the prospect of revolutionary upheaval), so the reasoning went, institutional intervention abroad was necessary to maintain international order. This zeitgeist was crystallized in the Atlantic Charter, a press communique jointly released by President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill after their first face-to-face meeting in August 1941, before the United States had entered World War Two. The document presented these leaders' vision for a postwar order grounded in Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms": freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. This charter eventually served as the standard under which the United Nations - as the wartime alliance of Western democracies was soon called - crusaded against fascism.

Borgwardt argues that the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter used such unprecedentedly individualistic language that they reoriented international diplomacy from a being a strictly state-to-state arrangement to one that focused on the human person as the referent and laid the groundwork for the modern-day human rights regime. This was not all the result of authorial intent. Much like the Declaration of Independence in the United States was a non-legislative document that inspired a sea-change in thinking an a reorientation of values, the Atlantic Charter left an indelible mark on future international relations. It led to a Common Law-style evolving body of legislation and modes of thought. New Deal-style confidence in institutional solutions and concern for individual welfare synthesized to promote the creation of the Bretton Woods Keynesian economic system, the United Nations system of collective security, and the Nuremberg Charter on international justice and human rights. The New Deal faith that a measure of economic security for others meant security for oneself translated into initiatives like the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the devastation of the Second World War and the rejection of the so-called Morganthau Plan to de-industrialize Germany, as some advocated.

Borgwardt notes that the onset of the Cold War quickly cooled enthusiasm for these multilateral institutions as the United States and the Soviet Union quickly retreated into regionalism. Furthermore, 'freedom from want' - or economic freedom for the individual - soon acquired the flavour of Marxism in the mouths of many Americans with the rise of McCarthyism; freedom from want was eventually subsumed into free-marketism, which was something of a departure from the Rooseveltian ideal (although, Borwardt suggests, the New Deal was always conceived as an attempt to save capitalism from its own excesses, not to dismantle it).

Although the end of the Cold War produced renewed interest in the one-world vision of multilateralism, especially as Globalization appeared to present both opportunities and challenges for global governance, the onset of the War on Terror in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks prompted was Borgwardt sees as a lamentable U.S. regression into unilateralism coupled with a retreat from civil liberties and flouting of human rights (instantiated by detainments of terrorists in Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal - indeed, the entire invasion of Iraq). For Borgwardt, human rights and multilateralism are two sides of the same coin.