Internationalism

Internationalism. Although the term “international” was coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1770, historians usually locate the genesis of American internationalism in President Woodrow Wilson's promotion of the League of Nations during World War I. Wilson, a progressive internationalist, believed that the League could lessen the chances of another catastrophic war by providing a framework for arbitration or conciliation, for the limitation of armaments, and collective security against aggression—that is, the mutual guarantee of member nations' political independence and territorial integrity, enforced by economic and military sanctions.

Conservative internationalists—such as Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge and former president William Howard Taft—looked upon these provisions as a diminution of national sovereignty. Whereas they advocated a world parliament to make appropriate changes to international law and favored arbitration and conciliation to settle certain kinds of disputes, most conservative internationalists also believed that the United States should build up its military and reserve the right to undertake independent coercive action whenever the “national interest” was threatened. They balked at the League's provisions for collective sanctions and feared that membership might restrict independent, unilateral military action. The Republican‐controlled Senate prevented the United States from joining the League in 1919–1920.

World War II caused Americans to reconsider Wilson's vision. In 1943, the Arkansas congressman (and future senator) J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) secured President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's support for a resolution calling for a new peacekeeping organization; when Roosevelt assured doubters that its authority would not impinge on national sovereignty, most Republicans endorsed the Fulbright Resolution. In August 1945, the United Nations Organization was established, and President Harry S. Truman declared Wilson vindicated.

Yet, in the postwar years, Democratic and Republican administrations alike mirrored the views of Wilson's conservative internationalist critics and came to regard the United Nations (UN) as an unreliable instrument of foreign policy. In the bipolar Cold War world, American internationalism metamorphosed into “globalism,” characterized by unilateral interventionism (often in direct violation of the UN Charter) and the impulse to hegemonic power. In the 1980s, the U.S. grew hostile toward the UN and even hinted at withdrawal in part because the General Assembly, numerically dominated by Third World countries, frequently asserted itself against American economic and strategic interests. By the 1990s, as the Cold War ended, relations with the UN improved, aided by a growing recognition that many critical problems (especially those concerning the global environment) required concerted action. Still, the United States remained ambivalent about the UN's peace‐keeping missions and highly selective about the use of international military force, invoking the UN's authority when Iraq invaded oil‐rich Kuwait in 1990–1991 and virtually ignoring it when ethnic violence erupted in Kosovo in 1998–1999. Some politicians wanted to reduce America's financial contributions to the UN while others argued that American military units should never serve under any but American commanders in any circumstances. If, as Senator Fulbright once remarked, internationalism was “the one great new idea” of the twentieth century in the field of U.S. international relations, its basic Wilsonian tenets remained controversial and unfulfilled as the twenty-first century began. Indeed, the administration of President George W. Bush was the most unilateralist since World War II, downgrading the United Nations, withdrawing from international negotiations on the environment and other matters, and even spurning NATO allies like France and Germany to pursue policies it deemed in America's national interests.
See also Foreign Relations; Isolationism; Post–Cold War Era.

Bibliography

Warren F. Kuehl , Seeking World Order: The United States and International Organization to 1920, 1969.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan , On the Law Of Nations, 1990.
Thomas J. Knock , To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, 1992.
Gary B. Ostrower , The United Nations and the United States, 1998.

Thomas J. Knock

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer