Internationalism

Internationalism. Internationalism emerged early in the twentieth century to challenge isolationism as a proper American approach to international affairs. In the balance between them lay competing perceptions of the role of external conditions in the country's remarkable security and well‐being.

For some Americans, the country's favored position rested on elements of international stability whose permanence required the nation's attention. At the turn of the twentieth century, writers such as Alfred T. Mahan, supported by members of the eastern Anglo‐Saxon elite, argued that the rise of potentially expansionist Germany and Japan demanded closer ties to Britain. Other internationalists discovered the surest guarantee of universal peace, and with it the perpetuation of a world that served U.S. interests admirably, not in superior force but in the international acceptance of non‐power devices, such as arbitration and conciliation, for the settlement of international disputes. For such legalists as William Howard Taft and Elihu Root, the final guarantee of world peace lay in a world court that would command the absolute confidence of the entire world. American internationalism scored its initial triumph in response to the horrors of the Great War of 1914. Pressed by President Woodrow Wilson, the Versailles Conference in 1919 adopted the American program for institutionalized peace in the form of the League of Nations and the World Court.

If the Senate's rejection of the Treaty of Versailles marked a powerful resurgence of American isolationism, it did not quell the determination of the country's internationalists to fulfill Wilson's admonition that the United States actively pursue the cause of peace. In the vanguard of the country's postwar internationalism were academics and students of international law, such as the University of Chicago's Quincy Wright and Columbia's James T. Shotwell. Members of the eastern establishment of international bankers and lawyers entered the internationalist ranks through membership in the recently founded New York Council on Foreign Relations. Internationalists comprised largely the country's pro‐League forces, who predicted endless triumphs for peace from a League of Nations morally enhanced by American membership.

In practice, the internationalists, no less than the isolationists, ignored the persistent role of power in affairs among nations. For them the goal of universal peace, rendered essential by the recent experience of war, was sufficiently overwhelming to eliminate the problem of means. Internationalists denied that the United States need be concerned with any specific configuration of political or military power in Europe or Asia. Whereas isolationism insisted that the United States had no external interests that merited resorts to force, internationalism declared that American interests existed wherever governments challenged peace or human rights. It presumed, however, that the universal acceptance of the principle that change, to be legitimate, needed also to be peaceful would control undesirable international behavior. Every program fostered by American internationalists during the 1920s—membership in the League of Nations and the World Court, the employment of arbitration conventions, the resort to consultation in the event of crises, collective security, naval disarmament, or the outlawry of war as embodied in the Kellogg‐Briand Peace Pact of 1928—denied the requirement of any precise definition of ends and means in external policy, and anchored the effectiveness of any moral condemnation of aggressors to the power of an aroused world opinion.

Consigned by adverse opinion to failure on the League issue, internationalists seized World Court membership as the alternative approach to effective international cooperation. Eventually the court battle comprised the most determined internationalist counterattack of the decade. When in May 1922 the court officially opened, a noted American authority on international law, John Bassett Moore, was among its eleven judges. Under internationalist pressure, President Warren G. Harding, in February 1923, submitted the question of court membership to the Senate. To satisfy congressional isolationists, Harding recommended four reservations that would absolve the United States of all commitments to the League but would retain for the country all powers on the court enjoyed by members of the League. Isolationists killed the measure as an overcommitment of American power and prestige.

Not until December 1925, when the issue of membership had won the support of peace groups, women's clubs, pro‐League forces, countless mass meetings, and much of the press, did the Senate agree to act. It approved membership, 76–17, in early 1926. But Senator Claude A. Swanson of Virginia introduced a fifth reservation that denied the court the right to render an advisory opinion on any question touching the interests of the United States. That reservation the court rejected; by the end of 1926, U.S. membership in the court had become a dead issue. Yet such membership would have entailed no commitment for the United States beyond paying its share of the court's expenses. Internationalists agreed that neither the League nor the World Court had confronted any major challenges, nor had either institution demonstrated any capacity to restrain a major power.

Despite its limited prospects, the internationalist faith in such institutions continued into the following decade. However, its central assumption that world opinion was the ultimate arbiter in world affairs denied its adherents any answer to the troubling aggressions of the 1930s. As late as 1939, internationalists looked to the League as the world's primary hope for peace. In their general unconcern for military preparedness, they had done little in previous years to provide the League with either the sanctions or the means required for effective collective security. But internationalism, as embodied in the ideals of the League of Nations, failed not only in its unwillingness to provide a defense against aggression and violence but also in its refusal to seek some accommodation with change as the only long‐term alternative to war. Any system of collective security would seek order rather than change.

For the British historian Edward Hallett Carr, in his noted book The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939), collective security, like American internationalism, expressed the concern of status quo powers to prevent unwanted change in the international system. Thus peace became the vested interest of the predominant powers. With no single country strong enough to exercise a pax Romana or a pax Britannica, slogans such as “collective security” and “resistance to aggression” proclaimed the identity of interest between the dominant, satisfied group of nations and the world as a whole in the maintenance of peace. Throughout the interwar years American internationalism, despite its persistent effort to engage the United States in world affairs, remained essentially an effort to sustain the status quo without accepting the price, either in military preparations or in concessions, that international peace demanded.

The attack on Pearl Harbor destroyed the illusion that the United States could have the world of its choice without cost. That event not only diminished the power of isolationism in Congress and the nation but also reinvented American internationalism. The realization that war had come unexpectedly and over vast distances recommended, at least to the country's military leaders, that the United States never again entrust its peace to world opinion or the oceans. Rather, its continuing interest in international stability required a military structure of sufficient magnitude to discourage aggression everywhere. The wartime decisions designed to engage the nation heavily in the post‐war world included commitments to the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other postwar international institutions. These decisions to assure postwar peace and stability received the support of an overwhelming national consensus. Internationalism emerged from the war firmly in the saddle.

What ultimately converted internationalism into an unprecedented body of worldwide economic and security commitments was the assumption that Soviet expansionism, rendered global and unlimited by the Kremlin's alleged control of international communism, endangered American and world security. Such fears led to a system of global military containment, including NATO and eventually treaties of alliance with dozens of countries throughout the world. More limited, yet more pervading, internationalists embraced the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economies of Europe. Acting through inter national agencies of trade and monetary stabilization, the plan contributed heavily to the world's unprecedented prosperity. Through forty years of Cold War, the USSR, as a perceived global danger, enabled the United States, with its abundance of economic and military power, to maintain a worldwide influence without precedent in modern history.

After 1990, the passing of the Cold War, in denying the United States its special role as the world's self‐appointed defender against communism, again compelled the country to redefine the meaning of its internationalism. Internationalists quickly detected new foreign challenges in the form of resurgent nationalism, ethnic strife, border disputes, economic chaos, and civil war. Confronting them in their demands for national action, moderates cited the potentially heavy costs of involvement in the world's domestic turmoil, especially when contrasted to the minimal U.S. interests at risk. Internationalism, as the past had demonstrated, was never an absolute good in itself; its utility hinged on its success in advancing the interests of the nation and its citizens.
[See also Isolationism.]

Bibliography

Edward Hallett Carr , The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1939.
Akira Iriye , From Nationalism to Internationalism: United States Foreign Policy to 1914, 1977.
Michael S. Sherry , Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941–45, 1977.
Norman A. Graebner , America as a World Power: A Realist Appraisal from Wilson to Reagan, 1984.
Robert D. Schulzinger , The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1984.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius , Wilson's Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism During World War I, 1991.
Jeremy Aynsley , Nationalism and Internationalism, 1993.
Kjell Goldmann , The Logic of Internationalism: Coercion and Accommodation, 1994.

Norman A. Graebner