The Many Meanings of Multilateral: U.S. Foreign Policy and the 'Turn-Around' of the 1940s

43 Pages Posted: 8 Aug 2011

See all articles by Hilde Restad

Hilde Restad

Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)

Date Written: August 8, 2011

Abstract

One of the most important assumptions in the study of U.S. foreign policy and multilateralism is that of the 'turn-around.' Most accounts of U.S. foreign policy assume 'the events of the Second World War brought about a revolution in American attitudes.' Political scientists, economists, and historians generally agree that the United States failed to shape international politics in the interwar period because of its rejection of membership in the League of Nations, but that the United States fundamentally changed with World War II, discarding its earlier tradition of “aloofness” in favor of multilateral internationalism. This 'turn-around' thesis is based on several assumptions about the nature of U.S. foreign policy. The first of these is that it took the shock of Pearl Harbor for the United States to finally turn away from an earlier foreign policy tradition of 'aloofness' (previously called 'isolationism'). Second, the institutional order building that took place under U.S. auspices in the 1940s signaled a profound U.S. foreign policy turn-around towards a new tradition of multilateral internationalism.

In this paper, I question these assumptions and argue that the turn-around thesis should be significantly modified. Specifically, I argue: (1) that it did not take Pearl Harbor to change the path the United States was on because the United States was not isolationist following the rejection of the League of Nations; (2) that the international order the United States created after the war was compatible with its historic foreign policy tradition – best described as unilateral internationalism - because it constructed a system based on hegemony, not multilateralism.

This argument entails appreciating the extent to which the United States has always had an internationalist foreign policy (including the early years of the Republic and the interwar period); and the extent to which it in the 1940s was the hegemon presiding over a multilateral structure, as opposed to a country joining a multilateral framework (which would mean subjecting itself to the same rules as all other members). Whereas the United States created numerous international institutions during the Second World War, subsequent U.S. administrations were not constrained by these institutional rules and procedures to the same extent that other member states were. In other words, the U.S.-sponsored institutional order was designed to bind the behavior of other states, but not that of the United States itself.

My argument also necessitates a discussion of what is meant by 'multilateral.' The debate over the legitimacy of a 'turn-around' thesis of U.S. foreign policy hinges not on whether the United States turned from isolationism to internationalism – as the term isolationism itself is now regarded as outdated in the field of U.S. foreign relations history - but rather on whether the United States turned from unilateral internationalism to multilateral internationalism. As this article will show, there is good reason to question the fundamental U.S. commitment to multilateralism and the turn-around thesis that underlies it. In the end, this also helps shed light on the post-Cold War debates on unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy.

Keywords: U.S. foreign policy, multilateralism, unilateralism, isolationism, internationalism, World War II

Suggested Citation

Restad, Hilde, The Many Meanings of Multilateral: U.S. Foreign Policy and the 'Turn-Around' of the 1940s (August 8, 2011). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1906619 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1906619

Hilde Restad (Contact Author)

Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) ( email )

P. O. Box 8159 Dep.
Oslo, 0033
Norway

HOME PAGE: http://www.hilderestad.com

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