Internationalism Stillborn

Abstract

In the summer of 1945, freshman Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) rose on the floor of the U.S. Senate to express doubt about America's commitment to internationalism. It was a strange speech coming from the author of the Fulbright-Connally resolution. Moreover, only days before, the Senate had unanimously ratified the charter of the newly established United Nations. But it was precisely that unanimity that worried Fulbright. What had happened to Robert Taft (R-OH) and his isolationist/nationalist followers who had fought tooth-and-nail against the Bretton Woods agreements and the British loan and ultimately succeeded in weighing them down with provisions that preserved America's freedom of action and its preeminent economic position in the non-Communist world? Could it be, Fulbright asked, that the charter recreated the old system of power politics and spheres-of-interest diplomacy, simply dressing it up in internationalist clothing? The answer, he concluded, was yes. In his tightly reasoned, carefully researched study of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of 1944, Robert Hilderbrand comes to exactly the same conclusion as Fulbright. Hilderbrand argues convincingly that British, American, and Soviet architects of the United Nations fashioned not a truly internationalist organization but rather a version of Roosevelt's Four Policemen concept. The absolute great-power veto, the provision for regional collective security arrangements, and part seven of the UN Charter's Article 2, which reserved to member nations “matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state,” ensured complete freedom of action for the Big Three. Nowhere in the Dumbarton Oaks document or the UN Charter did nations relinquish any part of their national sovereignty or agree to be bound by majority rule or the will of an international agency. There would be no standing multinational military force, and the world court was to be merely a body advisory to the Security Council without compulsory jurisdiction. The key to understanding the impotence of the United Nations, Hilderbrand argues, lies not in the history of the organization since 1945 but in the events of 1944–45. The United Nations was a continuation of the Grand Alliance, and in late 1944 when the Dumbarton Oaks Conference was going on, the wartime coalition was falling apart. The dream of a new world body capable of establishing a lasting peace fell victim to the nationalism of the founders and to the developing rivalry between the Soviet Union and Anglo-America. Indeed, Hilderbrand argues, the United Nations's shortcomings were intentionally built in at Dumbarton Oaks.