congressional_record: CREC-1996-10-21-pt1-PgS12458
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| CREC-1996-10-21-pt1-PgS12458 | 1996-10-21 | 104 | 2 | ADDRESS BY AMBASSADOR RICHARD GARDNER: ``FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT AND WORLD ORDER: THE WORLD WE SOUGHT AND THE WORLD WE HAVE'' | SENATE | SENATE | ALLOTHER | S12458 | S12463 | [{"name": "Edward M. Kennedy", "role": "speaking"}] | 142 Cong. Rec. S12458 | Congressional Record, Volume 142 Issue 143 (Monday, October 21, 1996) [Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 143 (Monday, October 21, 1996)] [Senate] [Pages S12458-S12463] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] ADDRESS BY AMBASSADOR RICHARD GARDNER: ``FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT AND WORLD ORDER: THE WORLD WE SOUGHT AND THE WORLD WE HAVE'' Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, Richard Gardner, the U.S. Ambassador to Spain and one of the Nation's most respected authorities on foreign policy, delivered an important address in Turin, Italy, last month at a conference on the legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt in modern international relations. Ambassador Gardner's address is an eloquent and instructive analysis of President Roosevelt's remarkable leadership in leading the United States out of the isolationism that marked the [[Page S12459]] years before World War II and his vision of a post-war world in which nations could and would work together to achieve common security, promote economic development, and protect human rights. Ambassador Gardner also perceptively analyzes our current efforts with other nations to adapt these goals and ideals to the practical conditions and needs of the modern world. At a time when some in Congress are inclined to prefer isolationism and unilateral action, Ambassador Gardner's address offers a compelling analysis that ``practical internationalism'' is the right approach for the future. I believe that his address will be of great interest to all of us in Congress and to many others in the country, and I ask that it may be printed in the Record. The material follows: Franklin Roosevelt and World Order: The World We Sought and the World We Have (Address by Richard N. Gardner, U.S. Ambassador to Spain, at the Conference on The Legacy of FDR) January 6, 1941: Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini are the masters of Western Europe. Nazi armies have over-run Poland, occupied Denmark and Norway, invaded the Netherlands and Belgium, and conquered France. Russia stands aside, faithful to the Hitler-Stalin pact. Only England resists the onslaught of Fascist tyranny, bracing itself under terrifying air raids for the expected German invasion. In Asia, the militarists of Japan are on the march. The United States is beginning, hesitantly, to give help to England, yet the Lend-Lease Act has not yet passed the Congress, and the American people are overwhelmingly against entering the European war. It is hard to imagine when or how peace and freedom can ever be restored to Europe--or the world. In this dark moment an American President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, appears before the Congress of the United States. He tells the American people they face an unprecedented threat to their freedom. He pledges all of America's resources to the defense of the democracies. And he inspires his countrymen with the following statement of what the historic struggle is all about: ``As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone. Those who man our defenses, and those behind them who build our defenses, must have the stamina and courage which come from an unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending. The mighty action which we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all things worth fighting for. ``In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression-- everywhere in the world. ``The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world. ``The third is freedom from want--which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peace time life for its inhabitants--everywhere in the world. ``The fourth is freedom from fear--which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world. ``That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. ``To that new order we oppose the greater conception--the moral order. . . . The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.'' What prompted Franklin Roosevelt to present this ambitious vision of a postwar world? What specific measures did he initiate to move toward that goal? What have been the results? What guidance can we find in his foreign policy legacy today? One could write a book about questions like these, but let me try, within the confines of one speech, to suggest some answers. I believe it is fitting that we discuss such questions in Europe, and particularly in Italy. Had Roosevelt not been President of the United States, it is doubtful that the United States would have moved so firmly in 1941 to oppose the Axis powers. With a different President, committed to an isolationist policy, Japan might not have attacked Pearl Harbor; Hitler and Mussolini might not have declared war on the United States. Europe might have lived for decades under Fascist tyranny. Moreover--and this is the point I wish to develop here--our postwar institutions for cooperation in peace and security, trade and development, and human rights might never have been created. Franklin Roosevelt was an idealist. But he was also, to use John F. Kennedy's famous description of himself, ``an idealist without illusions.'' He could be pragmatic--should I say even Machiavellian?--in accommodating to political realities, but he remained faithful to a consistent vision of the future. He understood only too well how hard it would be to realize the kind of postwar world he described, but he was equally convinced of the need to try. As Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in 1920, Roosevelt had campaigned, in vain, for Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations. In his view, the rise of Fascism and the coming of the Second World War were caused in large part by the failure of the United States to join the League. He also blamed the peacemakers at Versailles for failing to create effective international institutions to assure collective security, economic solidarity, and human rights. He believed that the American people would never throw their full weight into the struggle against Fascism if they saw nothing better at the end of the road than more unrestrained military competition, more ``spheres of influence,'' more depression and economic nationalism, more colonial aggrandizement--and more war. He was convinced that these misfortunes would inevitably result unless the United States once and for all renounced isolationism and took the leadership in constructing a new world order based on enduring moral principles. As he told the Congress: ``We shall have to take the responsibility for world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict.'' the world we sought Thus it was that Roosevelt moved swiftly, even before the United States entered the war, to lay the basis for American leadership in a postwar peace system. In an historic meeting at sea with Winston Churchill in August 1941, the two leaders proclaimed in the Atlantic Charter ``certain common principles . . . on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.'' The Charter contained eight fundamental propositions: no territorial aggrandizement; no imposed or undemocratic territorial changes; sovereign rights and self-government for all peoples; access, on equal terms, to the trade and raw materials of the world for ``all States, great or small, victor or vanquished''; international economic collaboration to secure ``improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security''; a postwar peace assuring safety to all nations and freedom from fear and want for all men; freedom of the seas; and, ``pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security,'' the disarmament of aggressor nations and ``the reduction for peace-loving peoples of the crushing burden of armaments.'' On January 1, 1942, the principles of the Atlantic Charter were subscribed to in a document promulgated in Washington by the 26 nations allied in the struggle against the Axis powers. That document was called the ``Declaration by the United Nations''--a term invented by President Roosevelt. It was his inspiration to propose the same term to describe the permanent peace organization that would be founded by the victorious allies at San Francisco. Roosevelt's conception of a postwar world order had three main elements--collective security, economic cooperation, and human rights. Each of these elements found its way into the United Nations Charter, and achieved concrete expression in global and regional institutions that remain with us today. We now take these concepts so much for granted that it is hard to realize how revolutionary they were when they were first set forth by Roosevelt and his Administration some 50 years ago. To begin with, collective security. Roosevelt pressed a skeptical Winston Churchill and an unconvinced Joseph Stalin to accept the idea of a global organization to keep the peace. Churchill preferred several regional peace organizations; Stalin probably wanted none at all--just Big Three arrangements to keep the Axis powers disarmed and acceptance of a new Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe. But Roosevelt prevailed. His postwar peace system seemed at the time a judicious blend of realism and idealism: Four so- called ``policemen''--the United States, Britain, Russia and China--would put their forces at the disposal of the United Nations to keep the peace and would receive the special privilege of the veto (later these became the five Permanent Members of the Security Council with the addition of France). All UN members large and small would undertake common commitments to settle their disputes peacefully and refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of other nations. Roosevelt believed that the great powers should learn to live without colonial empires and spheres of influence, accepting the same obligations of international law as smaller countries. He applied this belief to the United States in Latin America just as he sought to apply it to the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. As he had written in the journal Foreign Affairs as far back as 1928: ``The time has come when we must accept . . . a newer and better standard in international relations.'' Should disorder threaten a sister nation in Latin America, ``it is not the right or the duty of the United States to intervene alone. It is rather the duty of the United States to associate with itself other American Republics, to give intelligent joint study to the problem, and, if the conditions warrant, to offer the helping hand or hands in the name of the Americas. Single-handed intervention by us in the affairs of other nations must [[Page S12460]] end; with the cooperation of others we shall have more order in this hemisphere and less dislike.'' An important part of Roosevelt's concept of collective security was the control and regulation of armaments. Roosevelt was no believer in unilateral disarmament--one need only recall his effective work as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the First World War and his leadership in making the United States the ``arsenal of democracy'' in the struggle against Fascism. But throughout his life he was a passionate supporter of multilateral and reciprocal disarmament under international control wherever it was achievable, and he looked towards a world in which all nations would be disarmed except the ``four policemen''-- whose arms would be used only to safeguard the common security in accord with decisions of the Security Council of the United Nations. Although he died a few months before the first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, he had begun to think about the terrible destructive power of nuclear weapons. A year after his death President Truman, following in the spirit of Roosevelt's thinking on disarmament, offered to turn over the then U.S. monopoly of nuclear weapons to the United Nations, if other countries would also foreswear their development. Stalin's rejection of this proposal, known as the Baruch Plan, set us on the path of the nuclear arms race and opened up today's frightening prospects of nuclear proliferation. There are those who believe that Roosevelt acquiesced in the domination by the Soviet Union of Eastern Europe is violation of the very universal principles he was espousing with the founding of the United Nations. The facts are to the contrary. At the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt secured from Stalin pledges of ``the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people'' (Declaration on Liberated Europe) and, in the case of Poland, ``free and unfettered elections . . . on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot'' (Declaration on Poland). The Soviet suppression of freedom in Eastern Europe was not the result of the Yalta Agreements--it took place in violation of them. In the weeks before his death, Roosevelt sent a stern message of protest to Stalin for his failure to honor the Yalta Agreements. But he was powerless to force the Russians out of countries their conquering armies had occupied. As the historian Robert Dallek has written after an exhaustive examination of the historical record: ``The suggestion that Roosevelt could have restrained this Soviet expansionism through greater realism or a tougher approach to Stalin in unpersuasive.'' To the same effect is George Kennan's judgment that as an aftermath of World War II ``no one could deny Stalin a wide military and political glacis on his western frontier . . . except at the cost of another war, which was unthinkable.'' Finally, we have the testimony of Averell Harriman, Roosevelt's wartime Ambassador to the Soviet Union: ``It was Stalin's actions which brought on the Cold War. Roosevelt has been criticized for being taken in by Stalin and for unwisely trusting him. Nothing is more unfair. If he had failed to try, Roosevelt would have been held responsible for the breach between us.'' Economic cooperation was the second essential element in Roosevelt's conception of world order. He was determined to put an end to the American tradition of economic nationalism and use American power to construct a new and cooperative international economic order. He had told his countrymen that American democracy could not survive if one-third of the nation were ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed; he now urged upon his countrymen the further recognition that American welfare could not be assured in a disordered and impoverished world economy. The Second World War, Roosevelt believed, was caused in part by the wild currency disorders, mass unemployment and economic desperation that brought Hitler and Mussolini to power. This time priority must be given to laying the economic foundations of the peace. And these foundations, while preserving the system of private enterprise, could not consist of unregulated market forces either within or between nations. To assure high levels of employment, growth, trade and economic justice would require an active role by governments working together through new international organizations. To this end, Roosevelt first of all rejected the idea of a Carthaginian peace--there were to be no war reparations exacted from Germany, Italy and Japan as Stalin and others wanted. On the contrary, the vanquished as well as the victor countries were to be given fair economic treatment and equal access to markets and raw materials. Not only that, but the peoples of vanquished as well as victor countries liberated from Fascism were to receive generous help from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), ably led by Herbert Lehman and later Fiorello La Guardia. To prevent another divisive postwar argument over the repayment of war debts, Roosevelt invented the Lend-Lease program, which brought $27 billion in wartime aid to Britain and $11 billion to the Soviet Union, with nothing asked in repayment except for a few hundred million dollars representing the postwar value of materials remaining at the end of hostilities. Lend-Lease was truly, as Churchill put it, the ``most unsordid act in history.'' The heart of Roosevelt's plan for a new world economic order lay in three new organizations--the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the International Trade Organization. Agreement on the first two of these institutions was reached at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1944, almost a year before the San Francisco Conference approved the UN Charter. Roosevelt and his colleagues considered orderly currency arrangements and properly aligned exchange rates as basic to everything else--hence the International Monetary Fund which was to assure a system of stable but adjustable par values, the elimination of exchange controls on current transactions, and a pool of currencies that could give countries time to adjust their balance of payments problems without measures destructive of their own or other countries' economic stability. Essential to the success of the par value system, however, was the harmonization of national monetary and fiscal policies. The original version of the White Plan was explicit in this regard--members were obliged ``not to adopt any monetary or banking measure promoting either serious inflation or serious deflation without the consent of a majority of member votes of the Fund.'' In the negotiations leading to Bretton Woods, however, references to the limitation of national economic sovereignty were progressively weakened, in deference to political realities in Britain and the United States (and probably other countries). The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was mainly conceived as an agency for postwar reconstruction. With a relatively small amount of paid-in capital, it was to operate principally by issuing bonds on the private capital market. The Bank was conceived without much thought to the vast needs of the developing countries, though it provided a valuable framework that could eventually be adapted to assisting them. Its founders also underestimated the requirements of postwar reconstruction in Europe and Japan, which had to be dealt with through the Marshall Plan, whose 50th anniversary we celebrate next year. When Roosevelt became President, the United States had only recently enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, the highest in its history. Thanks to Roosevelt's reciprocal trade agreements program, under which Congress delegated broad tariff-cutting powers to the President, the United States was finally in a position to work with other countries for the removal of trade barriers and the elimination of trade discrimination. Thus, when the U.S. Congress refused to approve the International Trade Organization, the world was fortunate to be able to fall back on a multilateral trade agreement-- GATT--which had been negotiated in 1947 under the authority of Roosevelt's trade legislation. GATT became the instrument for 50 years of largely successful negotiations to reduce tariffs and non-tariff barriers and resolve trade disputes. In Roosevelt's concept of postwar economic cooperation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the International Trade Organization were to operate as largely autonomous ``Specialized Agencies,'' loosely ``coordinated'' by the General Assembly of the United Nations and by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Other major Specialized Agencies that emerged as a result of Roosevelt's leadership included the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Labor Organization, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, and the International Civil Aviation Organization. ECOSOC was empowered to receive reports from the Specialized Agencies, to undertake studies, to call conferences, and to issue recommendations on economic and social questions. Human rights comprised the third element in Roosevelt's conception of world order. Roosevelt worked to establish a new and revolutionary concept in international relations-- that how a nation treated its own people was no longer its own business alone, but the business of the entire international community. Thanks to Roosevelt, the United Nations Declaration of January 1, 1942, spoke of ``human rights'' as a fundamental objective of the struggle against Fascism. And it was largely due to his Administration, prodded by private American academics and religious leaders, that the concept of human rights was firmly embodied in the UN Charter. Human rights meant, first of all, the rights of peoples to self-government and independence. Roosevelt was determined that the Second World War should put an end to colonial empires and to the centuries-old system of territorial aggrandizement by victorious powers. Clark Eichelberger, the founder of the American Association for the United Nations, has written of a wartime conversation with Roosevelt: ``The President said that when he had signed the Atlantic Charter, he had said we did not want more territory and that he was fool enough to mean it and would stand by it in the future.'' Even before the State Department developed its proposals for a United Nations organization it had at Roosevelt's urging, started work on the idea of an international trusteeship system, under which colonial territories conquered from the Axis powers (as well as other territories) would be administered for the benefit of the people and advanced toward independence. [[Page S12461]] But Roosevelt's conception of human rights was not limited to the self-determination of peoples. He knew too well that history is studded with examples of the unholy alliance between nationalism and tyranny. And he was convinced, with Hitler's campaign of genocide against the Jewish population of Europe as the most recent example, that violations of human rights could be a prelude to aggression and a cause of war. Thus his emphasis on individual rights as a postwar goal in the famous ``Four Freedoms'' speech. Hence the unprecedented commitment of UN members in the UN Charter to take joint and separate action in cooperation with the organization to promote ``universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.'' The story is told of a little girl who was asked to name her favorite American President and answered: ``Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt.'' The little girl was perhaps wise beyond her years. Mrs. Roosevelt undoubtedly played a part in deepening the President's commitment to human rights both at home and abroad. After her husband's death, Eleanor Roosevelt became Chairman of the UN's Human Rights Commission, and presided over the negotiation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the General Assembly in 1948. Mrs. Roosevelt also launched the UN on the drafting of the two basic human rights treaties--the Covenant on Political and Civil Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. But she knew that drafting human rights treaties was only part of what was needed: ``It is not just a question of getting the Covenants written and accepted,'' she used to say. ``It is a question of actually living and working in our countries for freedom and justice for each human being.'' the world we have How did it all turn out? It is impossible to do justice to 50 years of turbulent and complex events in the brief time that remains to me, but let me offer some very general observations. peace and security As everyone knows, the ambitious concept of collective security embodied in the UN Charter quickly collapsed with the collapse of the wartime alliance and the outset of the Cold War. It proved impossible to negotiate the special agreements under Article 43 of the Charter under which the Five Permanent Members and others were to make units of their armed forces available to the UN Security Council for peace enforcement purposes. Roosevelt's concept of collective security had to be implemented after his death by a different organization--NATO--conceived as a shield against Soviet aggression. Nevertheless, the United Nations, adjusting to the postwar realities, developed non-coercive peacekeeping in place of collective security. Despite the Cold War, its men in blue helmets played a vital role in containing conflict in such far-flung places as Kashmir, Cyprus, the Middle East and the Congo. The Security Council and the Secretary-General served as useful resources for the peaceful settlement of disputes when members had the good sense to make use of them. As the Cold War came to an end and the Soviet Union collapsed, the United Nations found itself called on to respond to an unprecedented number of new conflicts, requiring major operations in places like Cambodia, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. Between 1987 and 1993, the UN undertook more peacekeeping operations than in all the previous year of its history. In these six years the UN went from five peacekeeping operations with 10,000 soldiers and an annual peacekeeping budget of $200 million, to 18 missions with 70,000 troops and a peacekeeping budget of $3 billion. These operations placed great strains on the UN's operational capacity and even more on the financial resources and political will of its members. The UN found itself going beyond classical peacekeeping--men in blue helmets patrolling borders or otherwise supervising agreements to end hostilities. It was now obliged to assume responsibilities for the delivery of humanitarian relief and the maintenance of order in the midst of civil wars and even outright aggression. In Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, there were large gaps between the ambitous Security Council mandates and the capacity of the world organization to carry them out. The inevitable result has been disillusionment with the UN, particularly in the United States. These UN operations, as well as the crisis in Rwanda, have called into question a central assumption of collective security--the willingness of democratic countries to risk casulaties in conflict situations ``anywhere in the world,'' where they do not see their vital interests as being at stake. UN peacekeeping missions will continue to be important in future years in helping to contain armed conflcit and deliver humanitarian aid. We need to explore practical ways to improve the training, equipment, financing and command and control of these missions. The UN can also improve its capacity for preventive diplomacy--working to resolve conflcits before they explode into violence. But the time has come to recognize what the UN cannot do. Although the UN is still capable of traditional peacekeeping, it is not capable of effective peace enforcement against well-armed opponents who are not prepared to cooperate. This was amply demonstrated in Somalia and by UNPROFOR's experience in Bosnia. For the foreseeable future, the defeat of aggression and the enforcement of peace will have to be undertaken by U.S.- led ``coalitions of the willing'' as in Desert Storm, or by NATO-led coalitions such as IFOR in Bonsia. These are clearly different instrumentalities than Roosevelt envisaged 50 years ago, but they are not inconsistent with the UN Charter which he made possible. That remarkably flexible instrument provides in Article 51 for the right of ``individual or collective self-defense'' and in Article 53 for the utilization by the Security Council of ``regional agencies'' for ``enforcement action under its authority.'' The United States and its European allies are now at work in building a new security architecture in Europe, which includes a new and enlarged NATO, the Partnership for Peace program with non-NATO members, a strengthened Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and a broad Charter to govern NATO-Russian relations. A start has also been made at developing more effective regional institutions for the peaceful settlement of disputes and peacekeeping in Latin America, Africa and Asia, although much more needs to be done. This is a far cry from Roosevelt's grand design of collective peace enforcement by the UN, but it is a pragmatic response in the light of political realities. Whether it will be enough to keep the peace in a disordered world will depend upon constructive behavior by the five Permenent Members of the UN Security Council and by regional middle powers, the willingness of the European Union and Japan to assure greater security responsibilities, and most of all, on skillful displomacy, backed by adequate military power, by the United States. Roosevelt's ambitious hopes for the regulation and control of armaments by the United Nations have been frustrated by the same political forces that doomed a UN peace enforcement system. We have needed to rely, instead, on a decentralized system of agreements and institutions, some inside and some outside the United Nations. The START I and START II agreements, if fully implemented, will greatly reduce the number of nuclear weapons, and the renewal of the Non- Proliferation Treaty will help to check the spread of nuclear weapons. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty just concluded could also help reduce the danger of nuclear arms development. The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is playing a critical role in preventing nuclear weapons development in Iraq, North Korea, and other parts of the world. But still more can be done to strengthen the IAEA, to reinforce the export control efforts of the nucler suppliers club and to combat the growing black market in nuclear materials leaking from the stockpiles of the countries of the former Soviet Union. The Chemical Weapons Convention, the UN efforts to eliminate the scourge of land mines, the Missile Technology Control Regime, and the post-Cocom export control arrangements to limit the spread of high-tech conventional weapons are other elements in the world's still evolving and still inadequate efforts to limit the production and spread of dangerous weapons. Roosevelt saw the U.N. Security Council as the centerpiece of international cooperation for peace and security. It is increasingly recognized that altering the structure of the Council would be desirable if it is to continue to meet its responsibilities under the Charter. The changes in power relationships in the half century since San Francisco have led a number of countries, including the United States, to propose adding Germany and Japan as Permanent Members, with the creation of three or four additional seats to permit more regular representation of middle powers from Asia, Africa and Latin America. So far the UN committee studying Security Council reform has not been able to achieve a consensus on this proposal or any other formula for making the Council more reflective of contemporary power realities. Whatever emerges must maintain the effectiveness of the Security Council as the operational arm of the United Nations in responding to challenges to international peace and security. ECONOMIC COOPERATION Roosevelt's grand design for economic cooperation has stood the test of time rather better than his design for peace and security, though not without profound changes that he could not have foreseen. Instead of a system of fixed but adjustable exchange rates as conceived at Bretton Woods, we are now in a world of floating exchange rates for the world's major currencies, occasionally producing serious volatility and exchange rate misalignment. The International Monetary Fund was never able to assume its intended role as the primary supplier of liquidity to the world's developed countries, and it thus quickly lost any real influence over their monetary and fiscal policies. When the United States suspended gold convertibility in 1971, it put the world effectively on a dollar standard, and freed itself, at least in the short and middle run, from the necessity to balance its international accounts. Unlike the world anticipated at Bretton Woods, we now live in a world in which capital flows have displaced trade flows as the [[Page S12462]] principal determinant of currency relations; more than $1 trillion of exchange transactions take place every day, only about two percent of which are linked to trade in goods and services in our highly sophisticated 24-hour-day global capital market, the original IMF concept that members could regulate capital movements but not payments for current transactions has become totally obsolete. Yet Roosevelt was right in his fundamental concept that open trade relations require a measure of currency stability, and that currency stability in turn requires a degree of coordination of the monetary and fiscal policies of the major economic powers. So far as the industrialized countries are concerned, the efforts for such coordination now take place largely outside the Fund through meetings of the Treasury Ministers and Central Bank Governors of the Group of Seven (the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan). The practical results of efforts toward greater international management of the floating rate system have been limited so far by an obvious fact of international economic life: the governments of the major economic powers are not prepared to subordinate their domestic policy objectives to the goal of keeping their currencies in some agreed international alignment. Nevertheless, the search for greater monetary stability continues. It has enjoyed a measure of success through more limited regional arrangements, the leading example being the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System. We shall soon see whether the more ambitious goal of a European Monetary Union with a European Central Bank and a European common currency will be achieved by the target date of 1999. Like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank had a very different future than the one envisaged for it by Franklin Roosevelt. The Bank's resources were too limited to play any significant role in accomplishing its primary purpose--the postwar reconstruction of war-devastated Europe. That purpose had to be assumed by the Marshall Plan, in which the United States pumped $16 billion (the equivalent of $100 billion in today's dollars) into European economies from 1948 to 1952, thus laying the foundation for the ``economic miracle'' of the Continent in the 1950's and 1960's. The Marshall Plan was conditioned on the dismantling of intra-European trade barriers and on other concrete measures toward European economic unity. It thus led directly to the establishment of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation and paved the way for the creation of the European Common Market and eventually the European Union. Some Europeans in the postwar years claimed that an ``imperialist'' United States had ``hegemonical'' designs on Europe, but it is surely a strange kind of ``imperialism'' that urges weak and divided countries to unite so that they can become powerful economic competitors. The strong support that the United States continues to give to European efforts at economic and political unity has been motivated by its enlightened self-interest in having a strong European partner with which to share global economic and political responsibilities. In a very real sense, this is a contemporary expression of Roosevelt's concept of economic solidarity in pursuit of a better world order. The New Transatlantic Agenda signed at the U.S.-E.U. Summit in Madrid last December may thus be seen as the lineal descendent of the Atlantic Charter of 1941. If the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were unable to play the roles that Roosevelt imagined for them in relations between the United States and Western Europe, they have nevertheless more than justified their existence in the substantial technical aid and financing that they have provided to the less developed countries. The World Bank, moreover, became a model for the establishment of Regional Development Banks in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. And with the creation of the International Development Association, the Bank acquired the capability to provide large quantities of concessional aid to the world's poorest nations. More recently, with the end of the Cold War, the Bretton Woods institutions have acquired yet another unexpected role--that of assisting the former Communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe in making the transition to successful market economies. Roosevelt's goal of a cooperative one-world economic system including Russia, which seemed so utopian during the Cold War, has once again become a serious policy objective, even if its achievement still faces serious obstacles and uncertainties. The third instrument of Roosevelt's postwar economic design--an institution for the reduction of trade barriers-- has been realized in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, whose eight negotiating rounds have now brought average tariff levels in the industrialized countries down to four percent, while also subjecting non-tariff barriers such as quotas to greater international discipline. The recently completed Uruguay Round was the most ambitious trade negotiation in history, covering hitherto neglected sectors like agriculture, textiles, services and intellectual property rights. Half a century after FDR's death, a world-wide consensus is emerging on the virtues of market economics, open trade, and private investment, the basic principles underlying the postwar economic institutions. Countries containing some three billion people have abandoned economic autarky and joined a one-world economy. The Bretton Woods institutions and GATT are no longer the preserve of a privileged few, but must now respond to the priorities of a larger and more diverse constituency. This is both a measure of their success and a challenge to their future. The Uruguay Round also produced a World Trade Organization with an enhanced dispute settlement mechanism. Thus the plans for an International Trade Organization that were laid in the Roosevelt years have finally been realized--if 50 years late. Of course, the WTO still faces formidable difficulties, ranging from unfinished business of the Uruguay Round to new issues like trade and environment, trade and workers' rights, trade and competition policy, and the relation of the WTO to the multiplication of regional and subregional trade arrangements. The comparative success of the Bretton Woods organizations and GATT stands in marked contrast to the relative ineffectiveness of the central economic institutions of the United Nations--the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council. During the Cold War, these institutions were hampered by sterile East-West and North-South ideological debates. Moreover, the UN economic system became a non-system afflicted by massive fragmentation of effort, with 16 Specialized Agencies, 5 Regional Commissions, 6 major voluntary funding programs, and 105 intergovernmental bodies of one kind or another. The restructuring of this system for greater effectiveness is obviously now a high priority. Yet it would be wrong to write off the UN economic institutions as total failures. The UN Development Program, the UN Population Fund, UNICEF, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to take just some examples, have made notable contributions to the alleviation of poverty and suffering. And the UN's recent global conferences--the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, the Cairo Population Conference of 1994, the Copenhagen Social Summit of 1995, the Beijing Women's Conference of the same year, and the Ankara Human Settlements Conference of 1996--have not only raised public consciousness about urgent global issues, they have produced action plans that can guide us to a better world in the 21st century if we have the political will to implement them with the necessary policies and financial resources. Despite the considerable economic progress of the postwar years, there are still one billion people in the world living in abject poverty. Rapid population growth and the continued abuse of man's natural environment raise serious questions about the habitability of our planet for future generations. So the moral of this economic part of the Roosevelt story is clear. The institutions he made possible, though flawed in many respects, contained the capacity for adaptation to changed circumstances and established the habits and mechanisms of international cooperation which are essential for the resolution of the huge economic problems that still lie ahead of us. human rights In the area of human rights, as in the other areas of Roosevelt's postwar vision, we find ourselves with a half century record filled with both accomplishments and disappointments. One of Roosevelt's priorities that enjoyed rapid realization was that of decolonization. In our disillusionment with many aspects of the United Nations, we sometimes forget that it presided over a process that brought over a billion people in nearly one hundred countries to political independence. That this happened so swiftly--that it happened with so little bloodshed--and that the path to self-government was eased by the work of several dozen UN agencies engaged in public administration and technical assistance--all this owed much to Roosevelt's vision. But FDR's commitment was to individual rights as well as to the rights of peoples, and here the record is a mixed one. On the positive side is the progress that has been made in the United Nations in developing clear human rights standards that UN members are supposed to respect. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948 as a result of Mrs. Roosevelt's leadership, gave eloquent definition at the beginning to the political and economic rights that should be the legacy of every human being. The Covenants that followed--one on Political and Civil Rights and another on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights-- converted the main ideas of the Declaration into binding legal obligations and provided mechanisms to monitor members' performances. Other conventions such as those on Genocide, Torture, Racial Discrimination, and the Rights of the Child added to the rapidly growing body of human rights law that is supposed to govern the behavior of nations. But as Mrs. Roosevelt insisted at the outset, the key question is what the international community will do to ensure that these fine words are actually implemented by UN members in their own countries. On this the UN started slowly. Many UN members, particularly those in the Communist world, Asia and Africa, did their best to make sure in the early years that the UN's Human Rights Commission was a toothless talk shop for talented lawyers and avoided criticism of any individual country. [[Page S12463]] A modest advance took place in the late 1960's with the adoption of Resolution 1503, which provided authority for the first time to investigate complaints of ``a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.'' Gradually the Commission lost its inhibition against scrutinizing and criticizing individual countries. Still later, the Commission began to establish ``rapporteurs'' or expert investigators to examine complaints in individual countries and in human rights areas such as summary executions, religious intolerance, freedom of expression, and violence against women. After many years of frustrating debate, a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights was finally established in 1994, with the authority to conduct investigations and bring reports of human rights abuses to the attention of UN bodies. The High Commissioner is assisted in this work by a small UN Center for Human Rights in Geneva, which also provides advisory services to governments on how to implement the growing body of human rights standards. The collapse of Communism removed a core group of UN members who could be counted on to oppose all efforts to apply human rights standards to individual countries in an objective and principled way. Nevertheless there are still countries that claim that many ``Western'' concepts of human rights are not appropriate for non-Western societies. It is significant that this claim was resoundingly rejected at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, which reaffirmed that human rights are ``universal'' and must be protected by all governments ``regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems.'' As the massive ``ethnic cleansing'' in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda have reminded us, the UN still lacks any way of preventing large-scale violations of human rights or even of investigating them adequately as they occur. It will continue to lack this capability until UN members agree to provide it with the necessary legal authority and financial resources. In the meantime, we can at least take satisfaction at the creation of the War Crimes Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda that are investigating gross violations of international humanitarian law after the fact. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the principal perpetrators of these crimes will ever be brought before these tribunals for trial and punishment. It is perhaps to be expected that a universal body composed of governments could be only partially successful in implementing the human rights vision of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Governments are the problem, and their commitment to human rights varies enormously in different parts of the world. Fortunately, we can also pursue human rights progress through regional instruments (such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) and through the growing body of non- governmental organizations (such as Freedom House, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) that are making their influence increasingly felt at both the international and the country level. conclusions Let me suggest three conclusions from this undoubtedly imperfect effort to examine FDR's concept of world order and the extent to which it has been realized today. First, it is clear that the institutions of global cooperation that we work with today were shaped more by Franklin Roosevelt than by any other individual. Indeed, it is obvious that without Roosevelt we would have no United Nations, no International Monetary Fund and World Bank, no WTO or GATT, and no treaties embodying minimum standards of human rights or procedures, however weak and tentative, to implement them. We all know what these international institutions have failed to achieve, but how much more dangerous, disagreeable and hopeless our world would be without them! Second, I suggest that Roosevelt's basic philosophy of practical internationalism can still be a guide for mankind today, and nowhere more importantly than in the United States. It is the policy of the Clinton Administration to strengthen international institutions for cooperative action in peace and security, trade and development and human rights, and to make use of these institutions whenever possible. This does not mean, in today's imperfect world, that the United States will never act except through international organizations. Our approach, as President Clinton put it in his 1992 election campaign, must rather be, ``with others when we can, by ourselves when we must.'' It is a practical approach that FDR, that idealist without illusions, would surely have understood. But there are some in our country who do not believe in this kind of practical internationalism. They think that with the Cold War behind us there is no need to dedicate significant attention or resources to international affairs. And there are others who see the UN and other international organizations as a threat to American sovereignty and advocate unilateral action not as a last but as a first resort. FDR knew better. He saw as far back as 1941 that the United States could not pursue its vital interests or realize its highest values through isolation or a policy of acting alone. Isolationism and unilateralism, he knew, would not be sufficient to protect our fundamental interests--not in keeping the peace, not in controlling dangerous weapons, not in furthering currency stability or open markets, not in promoting fundamental human rights. Were he alive today, I am confident he would tell us that isolationism and unilateralism would not enable us to cope with the new challenges that have emerged since FDR's time-- the destruction of the global environment, population growth and migration, international drug trafficking, international crime, and international terrorism. Third, I believe this idealist without illusions, this man whose spirit overcame the handicap of a devastating paralysis, would ask us not to abandon hope in the face of our current disappointments, nor seek refuge from our frustrations in a cynical passivity, but to meet our daunting challenges through creative and cooperative action. As he himself put it in the speech he was preparing at the time of his death: ``The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.'' The best way we can honor his memory is to work together with that ``strong and active faith'' to strengthen the institutions of a better world order which he has bequeathed to us. ____________________ |