A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (review)

In August 1941, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met off the coast of Newfoundland to discuss the course of World War II and their ideas for the postwar world. This meeting serves as the departure point for Elizabeth Borgwardt’s absorbing and passionately argued study. After their meeting, the two leaders issued an eight-point statement, the “Atlantic Charter.” This brief document (less than 400 words) called for freer trade, self-determination of peoples, and an international order that would allow “all men in all lands” to “live out their lives in freedom from fear and want” (4). Borgwardt argues that this declaration “marked a bold attempt on the part of Roosevelt and his foreign policy planners to internationalize the New Deal” and constituted an important turning point in the history of human rights law (3).

Borgwardt’s book pursues two projects. First, it carefully recovers and explicates how this reorientation in foreign policy unfolded during a time Borgwardt describes as a “fluid and transitional ‘multilateralist moment’” (elsewhere she uses the phrase “multilateralist Zeitgeist”) that “briefly gripped the United States as World War II drew to a close” (143, 236). Borgwardt argues that during this brief and fluid moment the Atlantic Charter “prefigured” the Nuremberg tribunal and its emphasis on the rule-of-law, the United Nations and its reliance on collective security, and transnational institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, with their interests in promoting free trade (5). In pursuing this project, the book applies the traditional methodologies of intellectual history to the terrain of diplomacy. Borgwardt skillfully unpacks the key players, controversies, and decisions made at the Atlantic Conference, the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the meetings that led to the United Nations charter in 1945, and the Allied trials of Nazis at Nuremberg following the war. The book also contains compelling treatment of the legal history of human rights, dating back to such theorists as Kant and Grotius. With the exception of repeated mentions of Nelson Mandela’s reaction to the Atlantic Charter, though, Borgwardt is generally not concerned with how people outside of the United States reacted to these developments.

Overlapping with this intellectual history of diplomatic conferences and human rights law is the book’s second project. Here, Borgwardt asserts that the various legacies of the Atlantic Charter merit two related claims: One, that this multilateral moment demonstrated how the principles behind the New Deal traveled abroad, and two, that this shift in values depended “primarily” on “the lived experience of the Depression that enabled Americans to see the world anew” (6). Borgwardt’s arguments deserve the engagement of a wide range of historians, and should serve to stimulate further debate.

Borgwardt defines the New Deal broadly, as an “a pragmatic and polyglot idiom” that was “characterized by a certain naïve cheerfulness about the efficacy of sweeping, institutional solutions to large-scale social problems” (70). The notion of the New Deal as a widely shared cheerful idiom might have been rendered less vague if this book had engaged more fully with the New Deal’s domestic accomplishments, especially key undertakings such as the National Recovery Administration, social security, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. (Even the Works Progress Administration is mentioned only briefly, and then referred to incorrectly as the Works Progress Association (77).) By treating the New Deal simply as a cognitive style, Borgwardt misses an opportunity to establish specific links between the postwar exporting of the New Deal and its domestic approach to governance, one originally designed to address the crises of mass unemployment and the collapse of capitalism. Instead, Borgwardt chooses to “highlight the New Deal’s transformation from a set of domestic programs into a war aim, which then became infused with an explicit human rights agenda as it was multilateralized [sic] through the Four Freedoms and Atlantic Charter” (50). This decision to bracket the domestic New Deal in favor of an emphasis...