[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.

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       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.

                          ____________________