UC Berkeley - HIST 186 - 2012 Spring - Sargent - International and Global History Since 1945 - Lecture 02 - World Crisis, World Recast - 01h 21m 39s

Problem of Beginnings

[0:00]

Alright, it's just about time to begin and I would like to begin by talking about the problem of beginnings. When specifically should we begin, when should a historian begin a history of the postwar world. The problem of origins is a consuming problem for historians. We grapple constantly with the question of when we should begin our histories.

It can be difficult even to locate the beginnings of events that we think are familiar. When did the Second World War begin, for example? Do any of you have a quick answer to that question? (Student Response)

1937. That's a pretty good answer. But it's not the conventional one, right? When would we conventionally locate the origins of the Second World War?

(Student Response)

That's right September 1939. I would argue that you are every bit as correct to identify 1937 as the point of beginning for the Second World War. It's when the Second Sino-Japanese War↗ begins. It's a huge part of the Second World War -- the conflict between Japan and China.

But by dating the origins of the Second World War in 1939 we privilege the European theater of the War, right? We say that what really mattered was when Hitler invaded Poland. But a different perspective on the Second World War, one that was as sensitive to the war in East Asia as to the war in Europe, might locate the origins of the world war in 1937.

We might equally well say that the Second World War began in 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because it's really only at that point that the two theaters of the world, the European and the East Asian, adjoined and the two conflicts become a single world war. So the point is not that there's a correct answer. There really is no correct answer to the question. It's sort of contestable. The point is simply that origins can be a confounding thing to define.

Problem of Periodization

[2:00]

Sort of related to the problem of origins for historians is the problem of periodization. Historians are prone to divide history into convenient chunks which we label.

Think for example about American political history. How many of you have had the chance to take courses in American political history here at Berkeley? Okay, some of you. So you're familiar that political historians are prone to demarcate swathes of history and to pin labels on them. We might talk for example about the 1830s and 1840s as the Age of Jackson↗. The 1930s and the 1940s as the Age of Roosevelt↗. Maybe the 1980s and beyond as the Age of Reagan↗. This is contestable.

Labeling history like this is really useful for historians. It helps us to impose sort of organizing metanarratives on the past. The label tells us something about the key themes and problems of a particular period in history. So there's a purpose to this. But there's also a danger, right. The danger is that labeling a particular period of history as being dominated by a singular theme or problem is to privilege a particular perspective on the past.

If we call the 1980s the Age of Reagan for example then we're sort of implying that what really mattered about the 1980s was the rise of the political right in the United States -- the sort of conservative backlash against a long period of progressive liberal dominance -- the Age of Roosevelt.

But to privilege the political narrative, the rise of the right, is necessarily to sort of downgrade, at least in relative terms, other perspectives on the history of the 1980s.

Why call the 1980s the Age of Reagan and not the age of Silicon Valley? There's an alternative perspective which emphasizes technological and economic changes as being ultimately more important than political ones.

So metanarratives which we use to compartmentalize and to demarcate history they help us to navigate the past but they can also mislead us. It's important to remember that human history doesn't move to a single beat. There are multiple perspectives on the past and it all depends upon where we want to look.

And this is really important to remember when we think about the question of where to begin a history of the postwar world. It may vary depending upon the vantage point from which we approach it.

When Did the Postwar World Begin?

[4:36]

Let's consider some plausible points of departure.

1945: The End of the Second World War

[4:39]

Well, 1945 is the most obvious point of departure. It is indeed the point of departure that is identified in the course catalog. More than that it's the classic moment at which postwar history begins.

Why is 1945 a useful point of departure? Well, the answer is sort of obvious. It marks the end of the Second World War. The destruction of Germany and the greater German empire which Hilter↗ built in Europe. It marks the destruction of Japan's imperial project and the transformation of East Asian geopolitics↗. It also sees the creation of new international institutions. The United Nations is born in 1945.

It's also the point, and this is to look forward not backwards, that marks the beginnings of the unraveling of the Soviet American alliance which had fought and won the Second World War.

So 1945 is a key turning point for a variety of very important reasons.

But there are also problems with taking 1945 as a point of departure for the history of the postwar era.

The Second World War, after all, was a war that was played out primarily within the Northern Hemisphere. It does ... The war's violence does of course penetrate the Southern Hemisphere in Southeast Asia, just about, but it's a war that is fought primarily amongst the advanced industrial states: the Soviet Union, the United States, and Nazi Germany.

It's not a war that has so much relevance for the lives of people in the colonized world as it does for human beings in the sort of advanced industrial North↗.

1947: Indian Independence

[6:25]

If you're looking at the world from a sort of colonial or postcolonial perspective then you might argue that 1947, the year that marks the advent of Indian independence↗, is as plausible, perhaps even a preferable point of departure for postwar history.

If we privilege the history of decolonization as the most important, the most interesting sort of metanarrative of postwar history, then 1945 is not so obviously the point at which we ought to begin it.

Of course there are problems with taking 1947 as the point of departure too, right? That's the year that India and Pakistan became independent -- doesn't have so much resonance for the history of Africa as it does for the history of South Asia. So the appropriate point departure is always a question of one's vantage point.

Economic Vantage Point

[7:14]

Virtually all the themes that I've just been discussing over the past couple of minutes have to do with high politics, with international relations, with statecraft, with the rise and fall of imperial projects. But this represents a sort of thematic bias -- a bias towards the political and the strategic at the expense perhaps of the economic and the social. Was 1945 such an important turning point in the economic history of the world?

Arguably it was less important than the turning point that the 1930s represent. After all the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression↗, casts a long shadow.

The echoes of the 1930s are heard all the way through the history of the postwar era. The 1930s marked the end of one sort of international economic system or era and the advent of a distinct new era in international economic history.

We're going to talk much more about the consequences of this in today's lecture so I won't belabor the point. I want simply to suggest that if you are privileging the political economic organization of societies, even of the international system as your major theme, then you might argue that the 1930s marked a much more decisive sort of historical juncture than even does the Second World War.

Historical Prologue

[8:39]

So having reminded ourselves that points of departure are in a sense always arbitrary, that they depend upon the themes that we prefer to privilege, let's begin the lecture course with the historical substance. But I'm going to present this not as a sort of history of origins so much as a historical prologue. With a mind to what is coming next I want today to cover some of the history that will help you to better understand the history of the postwar world. So let's think about this not as the beginning of any historical narrative in particular so much as a discussion of some key historical background which will help you to better situate the history of the postwar era.

Three Major Themes

Political and Economic Ramifications of the Great Depression

[9:38]

We're going to deal with three major themes today. I want to start by talking about political economy. What were the consequences of the Great Depression both for the internal, political economic organization of societies and for the larger international economic system?

Answering this question is really really important for understanding the international economic history of the twentieth century. The Great Depression was the defining event of twentieth century economic history and we need to pay some attention to it in order to fully grasp what comes next. The history of this era, the era of the Great Depression and beyond could be characterized I would argue as the history of a revolt against globalization↗. That's the phrase that I use to identify this particular strand of historical interpretation, and it's a strand which we'll be dealing with in just a moment or two.

The Second World War

[10:36]

Next we're going to talk about the Second World War. The Second World War is obviously very, very important. It's a deeply and profoundly traumatic experience for the people who lived through it. And the searing experience of war will be constitutive in important ways of the postwar era that follows. So we at least have to pay some attention to the Second World War, the war of the world as we might consider it, as a theme that is in crucial respects determinative of postwar outcomes and experiences.

Postwar Settlement

[11:12]

And finally we're going to talk a little bit about the institutional aspects of the postwar settlement -- the foundations of peace.

Insofar as the postwar era begins with the self-conscious effort on the part of powerful states to reconstruct the international system, to build new international institutions, the United Nations and the Bretton Woods economic institutions↗. We need to pay attention to this history of self-conscious recasting. What kind of international order did the leaders of powerful states try to build? What were its basic institutional characteristics? And what would be the legacies for the history of the post '45 world.

To think about the foundations of peace will be the last of the three themes that we deal with today.

What About the Cold War?

[12:01]

What's missing from this thematic framework that I've just sketched out for today's lecture? You might be struck, maybe not, but you might be struck by the fact, that I haven't made any mention of the Cold War as a theme that we're going to deal with today. And we're not really going to talk about the Cold War today. Why not?

I don't want to suggest that there were no major tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. There certainly were. And the history of the Soviet American antagonism dates all the way back to the Bolshevik Revolution↗ in 1917.

But the point is that the Cold War was not a predominant theme or problem for the men and women who lived through and fought the Second World War.

They were much more concerned with the legacies of the Great Depression and with the fight against fascism in Europe and East Asia.

To search for the origins of the Cold War in the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s would be to run the risk of historical anachronism.

Danger of Assuming Knowledge of the Future to Historical Actors

[13:02]

It would be to venture into that history knowing what we already know about what was subsequently to come. And it's really important as historians to avoid that temptation. When we deal with history we have to remind ourselves that the men and women whom we encounter in the past don't know what we know about what was to happen next.

They were ignorant about the future. Of course we're all ignorant about the future. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. But as historians when we encounter historical actors we do so with a very dangerous knowledge and that is the knowledge about what actually did happen next. And we ought to be really conscious when we think about history of the reality that the people who made history, the people whom we encounter in our studies, were open to a range of possible futures. The alternatives were multiple so far as they perceived them.

They, like us, looked backwards for their points of reference, not forwards and that's really, really important to remember.

History is made moving forwards but the reference points with which men and women navigate history are always retrospective ones. We understand our own relationships to our own times not in terms of what is to happen but in terms of what has happened.

And when we encounter historical actors and seek to situate and understand them it's very important to remember that they too look backwards. They could hardly anticipate what we now know was to come.

The Great Depression: The Revolt Against Globalization

[14:40]

So with that caution, let's think a little bit about the history of the Great Depression, the revolt against globalization as I characterize it.

To understand the significance of the Great Depression I want to take you back in time. I want to take a really long way back in time. Let's think about the economic history of the world since ... over the past two thousand years.

What is the basic story of global economic history not over years or decades but over millennia? Crudely the economic history of the world before about 1800 is this.

Human Economic History Pre-1800

[15:24]

There are minimal gains in economic productivity. People become slightly more efficient at farming, at making things. But whatever gains there are -- are offset by the growth of the world's population with the consequence that the quality of life for ordinary men and women really does not improve between the times of Jesus Christ and the time, the beginnings of the 19th century.

For most ordinary men and women the condition of material life remains more or less stable over a period of about two millennia. You could even take the history back further than this.

We could go back to the earliest origins of human civilization and posit a basic continuity in the material condition of humankind. Human life is lived within stringent limits for most of human history.

Of course some people do become very wealthy and very affluent. High culture flourishes of course in the Renaissance. But to focus on the sort of efflorescence of high culture is to disregard the reality that the overwhelming majority of human beings exist in state of misery and penury.

The Industrial Revolution

[16:41]

And this is essentially the human condition until the Industrial Revolution↗. The Industrial Revolution is really really important as you can see in the chart here.

It begins to transform the economic prospects of humankind. The average income of each human being in the world if you look at the world's total productivity and average it out across the world's total population begins to increase really really dramatically in the 19th century. This stunning increase in global productivity and in global wealth is of course a consequence of industrialization, the application of machine power to the tasks of economic production.

The Industrial Revolution produces an increase of about 20 fold in the average well-being of each man, woman and child on this planet between 1800 and 2000. This is a stunning increase in global aggregate well-being the likes of which our species had never previously seen.

But of course as you all know very well the economic benefits of the Industrial Revolution are not evenly distributed. At least not initially.

Distribution of Economic Growth from the Industrial Revolution

[17:59]

Well, let's look at the distribution of global economic output before the Industrial Revolution.

If you look at the world around 1500 then you see really three major centers of economic activity and power. China, South Asia, and Europe, and the balance between the three is fairly equal.

The reason that Africa looks in this map -- the map is scaled according to the GDP or particular regions -- the reason that Africa looks less affluent than Europe, Asia and ... Europe, South Asia, and China is simply that there are fewer people in Africa. The continent is not particularly populous.

But if you look at the world in 1500 and then compare it with the world of 1900 then you can see that the global distribution of well-being has changed pretty dramatically. Europe now far eclipses South Asia and China. And the United States, an offshoot of European civilization, has become a major economic power.

The history of the Industrial Revolution is closely associated with the rise of Western ascendancy in the world's economic affairs. You can chart this is different ways.

What this chart here does is to show you Western Europe's share of the world's total GDP. And you can see that this increases pretty dramatically from the early modern period when Europe's share of global GDP is around 40% to the turn of the twentieth century when Europe's share of world GDP approaches 65 or 70%. The rise of Europe, the rise of European power, and wealth, is one of the crucial stories of modernity.

Inequality: Europe Industrialized First

[19:54]

So industrialization makes the world richer but its wealth will be unevenly distributed. How do we explain this increase in inequality between societies?

Well, the easiest explanation is simply this. The Europeans industrialized first so they enjoyed the benefits of industrialization before anybody else did. And that's the explanation which in my view is the most correct one.

At the same time we should not be insensitive to the ways in which economic developments in the 18th and 19th century transform actual relationships between the Europeans and the peoples of the non-European world.

Change in Relations Between Industrialized North and Global South

[20:40]

And so here we encounter the theme of globalization. Globalization has a long history. It's arguably a history that traces back centuries if not millennia. That's a theme for a different class. For our purposes it's essential to remind ourselves that globalization, which is to say, the integration of economic areas of nation-states and of regions increases rapidly from the 1860s. It brings, it establishes relationships of economic dependency between the peoples of the non-industrial world, the Global South↗, and those of the industrialized North.

The North becomes dependent upon the South for certain raw materials. The South becomes dependent upon the North for manufactured goods. Globalization transforms economic relationships among societies in ways that render them interdependent.

Technology Spurs Globalization

[21:39]

Why does globalization occur? Why is it that the world in the 19th century becomes economically integrated?

The most succinct answer is technology. The application of mechanical power to the purposes of transportation through the steamship and the railroad contract spaces and shrinks time. It reduces transportation costs in the economist's parlance and makes it cheaper and cheaper to shift goods and money from one place to another.

So technology plays a really really powerful essential role in the promotion of globalization.

Enforcement of the Rules of Globalization

[22:18]

It's also important to remember that there is a political or military aspect to the history of globalization too. Insofar as globalization depends on rules, rules that are enforced by social institutions, the history of imperial power, specifically the history of British imperial power is part of the history of globalization.

A long distance transaction, perhaps to ship a hundred bushels of grain from North America to market in London, doesn't do you much good unless you can be reasonably assured that the contract that you sign to transport that grain will be honored by payment in the amount specified at the moment of transaction. The enforcement of contracts over great distances is essential to the flourishing of a globalizing world economy.

And of course the enforcement of contracts depends upon an ultimate recourse to power. Even to coercive violence. So the history of economic integration has a power political aspect. Once again I don't want to belabor the point. It's simply important to remind ourselves that the history of imperialism, and the history of globalization are not wholly apart.

Consequences of Globalization

[23:37]

What are the consequences of globalization from the late 19th century? Well it produces a certain integration of the world economy. Economies become drawn into webs of tighter and more complex interdependence. Globalization also tends to produce a certain differentiation between different regions of the world economy.

This is your theory of comparative advantage. The industrial North begins to specialize in manufactured production. The South will specialize in the production of basic primary commodities.

Globalization confirms and accelerates a differentiation between core and periphery that sociologists of the world economy following Immanuel Wallerstein↗ have written about quite extensively. Again it's not the central focus of today's conversation.

What are the consequences of globalization for the economic well-being of ordinary men and women? This is a really interesting question. It's a really important question and it's a question with a great deal of contemporary relevance. Does globalization tend to produce a convergence in material conditions or does it produce a divergence that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. This is a contentious question and you're going to find different answers to it depending upon who you ask.

I'm a historian so I'm not going to offer any absolute answers to that question. I would say it depends. It depends upon the particular terms of ... Or the particular terms on which any given system of globalization operates. And here the experience of the late 19th century is sort of suggestive.

Globalization Decreases Economic Inequality Between North America and Europe In the Late 19th Century

[25:23]

Within the North Atlantic world, which is to say within the world of the United States and Canada and Western Europe the economic inequalities of nations tend to diminish between the 1860s and 1914. Globalization in other words produces a certain convergence in the material well-being of nations.

At the beginning of this period, in 1860, North Americans are much much better off in the average than are Europeans. The reason for that is fairly simple. There are fewer North Americas in relation to the economic resources they possess than there are Europeans. Europe is a much more densely populated place than is North America so there is less wealth to spread around.

As a consequence of the sort of migration of peoples from Western Europe to North America in the last third of the 19th century, a theme from which you're all sort of vaguely familiar, at least many of you will be intimately familiar with that history. Average incomes in Europe and North America do begin to converge. The convergence of labor markets produces a gradual trend toward convergence in ordinary human well-being.

Globalization does seem at least for a time to narrow inequalities between nation-states.

Economic Inequalities Within Nation States

[26:52]

The consequences for economic inequalities within nation-states are ... That's a different question. If you think about the contemporary world, just for a moment we'll come back to the world of the 1990s and beyond, what have been the effects of globalization on income inequality?

I mean very, very crudely, and we'll get into this much more as we move towards the end of the semester, the effects of globalization have been to diminish international inequalities, which is to say to diminish inequalities between nation-states while increasing economic inequalities within nation-states.

Does that make sense? Okay.

Globalization in the Last Third of the 19th Century

[27:34]

In the last third of the 19th century the experiences is not so different. Globalization also tends to produce a convergence trend in the well-being of nation-states. In some respects the globalization system of the late 19th century looks to be kind of benign, even harmonious.

The last decades of the 19th century are a time of remarkable international peace, even remarkable international stability. There are time at least within the North Atlantic world when goods, ideas and culture can transmit freely from societies, to society, from nation to nation. Globalization looks to be in this era a force that is propelling the world towards a convergent modernity. Things look to be pretty rosy so far as the future goes.

Globalization and the First World War

[28:32]

And then of course it all comes to a shuddering halt in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War. The First World War was a catastrophic event for the world economy for the international system of the late 19th century. A system that looked to be stable and harmonious operating according to the rules of rational self-interest within the context of a fairly integrated global market.

The experience of the First World War ought to be cautionary for us today insofar as it reminds us that exogenous political shocks can wreck catastrophic damage upon systems of relatively integrated international exchange. The experience of the First World War is sort of troubling.

Globalization in the Post First World War Era

[29:24]

After the First World War the relatively globalized international economy that had flourished in the last decades of the 19th century is briefly restored. Men and women once again presume themselves to be converging towards a relatively coherent vision of modernity, at least in the North Atlantic world.

North American social reformists for example look to West European social reformist for inspiration. Americans travel frequently to Europe, Europeans travel frequently to the United States. It seems in the 1920s as if the world has resumed the basic trajectory of integration and interdependence that it was on before the First World War.

It looks as if we're, have resumed the march, towards a technotopia as represented in Fritz Lang↗'s great, great, movie, Metropolis↗.

Differences Between Global Economic Systems Between the 1920s and Late 19th Century

[30:28]

There are key differences between the sort of restored global economic system of the 1920s and the late 19th century system.

Great Britain had been a sort of dominant political influence on the late 19th century system by the 1920s the United States has emerged as the dominant center of the global economy.

We don't need to belabor the differences. Once again that's a topic for a different class.

Restoration of the Global System

[30:55]

But the key point is that the 1920s witnesses a sort of restoration of liberal economic integration within the international economy with really important implications for the larger sort of international political system.

Things look to be back on course. The world economy is rolling towards convergence once again. And then of course the Great Depression happens in 1929.

The Crash of 1929 and the Beginning of the Great Depression

[31:26]

The tremors of the Great Depression of course predate the Wall Street crash of October '29↗. But the Wall Street crash is what causes men and women throughout the industrialized world to sit up and take stock of the fact that something really big has happened.

This is a second great shock to the system of 19th century globalization. And in most respects it's even more catastrophic than the First World War had been.

The First World War had been an essentially exogenous shock. That's to say that the origins of the First World War did not have a lot to do with globalization. The Wall Street crash has everything to do with globalization. It's a crisis which is endogenous to the global economic system as it has developed through the last decades of the 19th century and into the 1920s.

What caused the Great Depression ?

[32:23]

What caused the Great Depression? It's a big question we could spend all lecture trying to answer it but we won't do that.

The very succinct answer is that the Great Depression had to do with a convergence of cyclical downturns exacerbated by bad policy choices. Confronted by a serious recession governments implemented austerity plans and made the situation much worse.

There are economists who would dispute that reading of events. This is a politicized interpretation of history. So let me just acknowledge that, but the mainstream interpretation amongst economic historians is that a combination of cyclical recession plus catastrophic policy choice in both fiscal and monetary policy is what caused the Great Depression.

Consequences of the Great Depression

[33:16]

What were the consequences? Falling prices for goods and labor. Mass unemployment throughout the industrial world and widespread human immiseration. The Great Depression seemed to interrupt and then reverse the remarkable trajectory of economic progress that the industrial world had been on since the beginning of the 19th century.

There are other setbacks. There's a long recession in the 1890s which also sort of interrupts the march of progress so the Great Depression is not wholly unprecedented. It's just much, much worse than any previous recession of the industrial era.

Economic Catastrophe and Mass Democracy

[34:04]

It produces widespread immiseration and one of the key differences in the 1930s when you compare the experience of the 1930s with the experience of 19th century recession is that it occurs in a world in which a growing number of workers, probably a majority of them, have the vote. It occurs in a world that is democratic rather than a world that is still dominated, as 19th century Britain was, by aristocratic elites.

Immiserated and discontented men and women have a choice in the 1930s. They can choose to vote for political projects that promise solutions to their economic misery. They can vote for communist↗ parties that promise to spread the wealth much more evenly that the capitalist↗ system does. They can vote for fascist↗ parties which promise to sort of kick out the foreigners or which point the finger at bankers and blame them for the economic catastrophe of the era.

The point is that the 1930s are a particularly traumatic decade because of the combination of economic catastrophe and mass democracy.

Nation States Respond to the Great Depression with Protectionism

[35:23]

Even the states that do not end up opting for radical political alternatives whether of the left or the right end up implementing major policy changes.

Great Britain which had for about a century been committed to a free trade↗ policy throws up trade barriers↗.

The United States implements trade barriers, trade barriers of an unprecedented severity.

The Congress of the United States at the beginning of the 1930s passes a tariff, the Smoot–Hawley Tariff↗, which raises tariff barriers with the effect that it tries to shut out foreign goods, to shut out foreign competition, to throw up a big wall between the United States and the larger global economy.

This experience is replicated almost everywhere. Countries try to protect themselves against the recession by erecting barriers, by shutting out globalization, by circumscribing the national economy from the larger global economy of which previously it had been part. By consequence the 1930s witness a radical and unprecedented move towards deglobalization. Countries try desperately to disengage from the international economy by throwing up trade barriers and sometimes by making their currencies nonconvertible↗.

They do this in order to try to gain some leverage over the economic situation at home. So you see a series of choices that are made by nation-states to prioritize domestic economic policy over global economic integration. The price that has to be paid for regaining control over your economy at home is circumscribing your interactions with the larger world economy.

There are good technical reasons for all of this. We might get into some of them as the course progresses. The purpose of today's lecture is just to provide a sort of panoramic overview.

Relationship Between the State and the Market

[37:18]

So the 1930s brings really big transformations or shifts in the relationships between nation-states and the larger global economy.

How do we understand this? The relationship between the state and the market is a huge, huge topic. We're not going to plummet in any great depth today. Let me just point to a couple of theorists, economic theorists, who might help us to think about the ways in which relations between states and markets are changing in the era of the Great Depression.

Karl Polanyi

[37:59]

The first theorist who I want to talk about for a minute or so is Karl Polanyi↗. Have any of you heard of Karl Polanyi?

It's good. I'm glad some of you have and the rest should have done.

Polanyi is a really, really important thinker in the history of twentieth century economics. He probably better than anybody else analyzes incisively the relationship between the state, the democratic state, and the market.

Polanyi's crucial insight, really his foundational insight, is that markets are not natural, that they are embedded within larger political and social institutions and frameworks. Polanyi insists that you can't have a market without the rule of law, you can't have a rule of law without power. Markets ultimately depend upon a framework of political authority in order to function. In 1944 Polanyi publishes a book which is titled The Great Transformation↗.

The book offers a really important historical interpretation of the rise of market society. Polanyi systemically tries to demonstrate the ways in which the emergence of the market depended upon political structures of power that sort of contained and embedded the market.

But the book also offers a really important interpretation of recent history.

Polanyi argues that the rise of market society carries with it catastrophic human and social costs insofar as markets provide an efficient framework for the exchange of goods, services and money. Markets, at least markets that are not subordinate to some social control, can produce gross inequalities of outcome. They can make some people very rich and other people very poor.

By consequence untrammeled markets, Polanyi argues, come with serious social costs.

Polanyi having situated the state intention with the market sees the 1930s as the moment when society via the democratic state began to fight back against the free market.

Polanyi sees the relationship between the state and the market as this relationship of profound tension and argues that after a long period in which markets gained greater and greater autonomy from political power the 1930s marked the moment at which nation-states, which is to say political authority, tried to subjugate the market to some expanded political direction.

And this is what Polanyi characterizes as The Great Transformation of his times.

And what did this mean in terms of substantial policy choices. Well it involved some of those choices which I just told you about. The imposition of tariff barriers for example represents an effort by political power to interject itself in market behavior.

To prevent market transactions, which is to say the free movement of goods from one country to another, in order to serve some social purpose, presumably the protection of domestic industry against foreign competition.

The establishment of a social security system which the United States does in 1935 is a reassertion by political power of its prerogatives against the market.

In a society that was governed according to the strict dictates of the market we wouldn't have social security. Social security disincentives its beneficiaries from working as such it interferes with the natural play of the market mechanism. The establishment of a system of social security is an attempt by political power to subject the market to certain social norms, to make markets serve a social purpose rather than the reverse.

And this is one of the key stories of the 1930s. It's the backlash of society and politics against the market. And of course it happens because of the Great Depression. A depression that exhibits the sort of inability of markets to quickly correct themselves in the event of a systemic crisis which the Great Depression was.

So that's one key aspect of the economic history of the 1930s. The Great Transformation and the relationship between states and markets.

John Maynard Keynes

[42:53]

There are also major changes that occur in economic thought, and here the key theorist is John Maynard Keynes↗. Presumably most of you have heard of Keynes, right?

Have you studied Keynes in economics classes? Okay, to some extent. That's good.

Keynes, we could have a whole semester talking about Keynes, but we're not going to do that. Keynes is the crucial economist of the depression era. Keynes, perhaps better than anybody else, offers an explanation for why markets do not quickly correct themselves following the crisis of 1929.

After all classical economic theory↗ tells us that market behavior is cyclical. That a downturn which produces a fall in prices will quickly correct itself.

If there's a crisis of unemployment which produces abundant surplus labor then that ought to incentivize entrepreneurs to open factories that will put some of surplus labor to work. This is how markets correct themselves in the classical theoretical model.

And Keynes argues that the classical theoretical model might work very well in the abstract but it does not sufficiently encapsulate the complexity of an advanced industrial economy.

Keynes tell us that in an advanced industrial economy prices are sticky, they're not as fluid as the classical theoretical models suggest they ought to be, that a market in a condition of recession can become stuck there. This is Keynes' crucial theoretical insight. We don't need to go into too deeply.

The Keynesian Solution

[44:39]

What's more important for our purposes is the Keynesian solution↗.

Keynes argues that if markets are not self-correcting then somebody has to correct them.

And who is going to accomplish that?

What force is capable of intervening in the market with sufficient power as to be able to correct a structural downturn.

Government of course is the only power that can potentially accomplish this. Keynes argues that in order for the Great Depression to be solved, it's necessary for governments to spend enormous amounts of money in order to put workers back to work, in order to restore the smooth functioning of the capitalist system.

And Keynes, as he develops this argument, essentially invents the field of macroeconomics↗. It's an over simplification but it's not entirely untrue to say that before Keynes all economics was microeconomics↗. Keynes essentially invents the science of macroeconomics which is concerned with how the economy as a system ought to be managed and regulated.

Nation States Create Social Welfare Programs

[45:49]

Alongside the rise of Keynesian economic thought the 1930s sees the introduction of new welfare provisions, of new welfare states, throughout the advanced industrialized world.

This occurs in the democracies, the New Deal↗ in the United States produces a panoply of new welfare provisions, provisions that are intended to safeguard citizens from the worst that poverty can do. Similar schemes for social protection are established also in the fascist states↗. We'll have opportunities later on to go through some of the more detailed aspects of this. I just want to sketch out this basic big picture.

The Great Depression: Political Effects

[46:37]

So this is the economic transformation that the Great Depression brings -- a transformation in the relationship between societies, nation-states, and the market.

But the Great Depression also brings political consequences too. It has huge consequences for international relations. As I pointed out a few minutes ago by the 1930s workers in most democratic capitalist countries have the vote by the 1930s. And they can vote for political leaders, even demagogic political leaders, who promise them quick and easy solutions to their collective misery.

The prototypical case of this of course is Nazi Germany. It is no exaggeration to say that the Great Depression brings Hitler to power.

And that's really all that I have to say if I want to illustrate the catastrophic consequences of the Great Depression for international relations and for the European peace. A depression that produces a global crisis of liberalism allows really nasty, really radical people, like Hitler, into power. That same story is replicated elsewhere.

The Great Depression, for example, produces the crisis of Argentinian liberalism and brings into power an authoritarian military regime↗.

The Soviet Union During the Great Depression

[48:08]

The one country in the world that is really not affected by the Great Depression is the Soviet Union. And this is a really, really important point.

During the 1920s the Soviet Union had looked like an economic basket case. Early efforts to produce a sort of socialized system of public ownership in the Soviet Union, which begin in the early 1920s, turn out to be a catastrophe. And the Soviet Union ends up from about 1924 onwards undertaking a series of market reforms. It tolerates private property, it allows markets to have a sort of role in the determination of supply and demand.

This Soviet experiment in sort of reformed communism comes to an end in 1928 with the ascendancy of Joseph Stalin↗. Stalin decides to opt instead for a sort of breakneck program to socialize the Soviet economy, to transfer private property into the hands of the state, and to appropriate for the state ownership of all of the means of production, and this a really big transition in Soviet economic history.

Sort of fortunately for Stalin in some ways it coincides with the Great Depression in the West. The Soviet Union having decided to break itself off entirely from the larger world economy in the 1930s ends up industrializing fairly rapidly and producing sort of economic statistics, which though to some extent sort of are fictive, because these statistics are often manufactured by Soviet officials, nonetheless suggest that the Soviet economy is flourishing in the 1930s as the economies of the West lapse into malaise and crisis.

Comparing Communism and Capitalism

[50:13]

From the perspective of Western Europe the Soviet economy in the 1930s as it builds vast new industrial complexes like this factory in Magnitogorsk looks to be doing very, very well by comparison.

And this is really important. There are big political consequences to this comparison which people in the 1930s might want to make between the communist system and the capitalist system. With capitalism enmired in crisis communism looks for the first time relatively attractive as a way of organizing society.

Of course there are still tremendous costs associated with a communist style political system, even sort of the left wing Western intellectuals who go to Russia and fawn over Stalin's accomplishments, are for the most part not willing to sacrifice their own civil liberties in order to construct a communist system and we'll talk more about the political aspects of communism in due course.

But the point is that the specter of communism on the left, much like the specter of fascism on the right, imperils the historical prospects of liberalism in the 1930s. After a long era, 19th century globalization, restored in the 1920s in which liberalism looked to represent sort of the inevitable destiny of humankind, the 1930s mark a catastrophic disjuncture in the history of liberal societies.

Roosevelt and the Survival of Capitalism

[51:54]

Capitalism looks to be in a state of real crisis during the 1930s. Contemporary figures, people like Franklin Roosevelt↗, the President of the United States for much of the 1930s, take away profound lessons from the experience of that decade.

Roosevelt concludes that if capitalism is to survive over the long term it will be necessary for governments to take a proactive role in the management and stabilization of the capitalist system.

And it's exactly this sort of transformation in the relationship between the state and the market that Roosevelt credits himself with having accomplished.

The Old Gentlemen and the Silk Hat

[52:41]

And Roosevelt, running for reelection in 1936, tells an anecdote. This is probably fictional. In the summer of 1933 a nice old gentleman wearing a silk hat fell off the end of a pier, representing of course the affluent, the capitalist elite. He was unable to swim. A friend, FDR, ran down the pier, dived overboard and pulled him out but the silk hat floated off with the tide. Today three years the old gentleman is berating his friend because the silk hat was lost.

The Preservation of Capitalism

[53:10]

So what Roosevelt is in effect telling us, right, is that he has succeeded in preserving the capitalist system. He has succeeded in preserving the basic framework of liberal democracy and capitalist economics. The price that has had to be paid for that is a slight sort of increase in social transfers from the wealthy to the less wealthy. And that's what the New Deal does. It stabilizes capitalism through the establishment of a basic infrastructure for social provision.

And what's important for our purposes is that Roosevelt's reading of the history of the New Deal was very widely shared in the 1930s and 1940s. Economists, sociologists, historians, political leaders, most of them believe that Roosevelt really did succeed in stabilizing capitalism and in securing its future. The idea that you could go back to the 1920s, that you could strap away the social provision of the New Deal seems in the 1940s to be really catastrophic because the old, the system of liberalism unregulated by nation-states, liberalism without the welfare state, looks, looking back at recent history to be a formula for catastrophe. A formula that will produce major crises like the Great Depression and which might even allow radical political alternatives, fascists and communists to seize the day.

The Regulation of the Capitalist System by Nation States

[54:46]

So what is learned in the 1930s, is really, really important for what comes next.

Those who live through the 1930s learn a couple of things. They learn that the capitalist system needs careful management if it is to survive. And they also learn that the institution that is best able to manage and regulate and safeguard the capitalist system is the nation-state. It is the nation-state that provides welfare, and it is the nation-state that regulates the national economy, that creates demand when the market fails to do so.

This is all very, very consequential for what comes next.

That's the revolt against globalization. We'll probably come back to it again, again, and again. But I wanted to give you a sense of the picture.

The Second World War

[55:43]

Let's talk a little more briefly about the Second World War. What do we need to know about the Second World War in order to understand the postwar world?

First we need to understand that the Second World War was really really bad. In terms that is of the human catastrophe that it represented. The Second World War was by far history's deadliest war so far.

Deadliest War in History

[56:07]

A little less than half of one percent of the world's population perished in the Thirty Years' War↗ running from about 1618 to 1648. A few more than that, a little over half of one percent of the world's population, died in the First World War↗, in the trenches of the Somme↗ and the fields of fields of Passchendaele↗.

The Second World War↗ was twice as deadly -- more than twice as deadly as the First World War. Nearly one and a quarter percent of the entire world's population died in the Second World War. This is a catastrophic death toll. No war in human history has been so deadly as this.

And that's really, really important to remember.

It was a searing catastrophic event for all who lived through it.

Different Wars Within the Second World War

[56:58]

But the Second World War was not a single war. The Second World War involved multiple conflicts. They became joined together within the framework of the Second World War after 1941, but the Second World War unfolded in specific historical circumstances.

There were theaters of the war that were worse afflicted by the war's violence than others. Not all nations bore the burdens of the Second World War equally. This is really important to remember.

The War for China

[57:34]

What were the major wars that collectively constituted the Second World War? The four that I would suggest are the most important are: the war for China, which begins in 1937 and really does not resolve itself until 1949, until the Chinese Civil War↗ ends with The triumph of Mao Zedong↗'s Communist Party↗.

The War for Western Europe

[57:57]

There is of course the war for Western Europe, what we perhaps most instinctively think of when we think about the Second World War. The war that begins with Hitler's bid for European mastery and ends with his suicide in a Berlin bunker.

The War Between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany

[58:15]

The most catastrophic war of all however is not the war for Western Europe but the war on the Eastern Front -- the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Unlike the war for Western Europe this is not a war that can be plausibly presented as a conflict between fascism↗ and democracy↗. Rather it is a conflict between two totalitarian↗ systems. Hitler's fascism and Stalin's communism↗. It also happens to be by far the deadliest of all of the Second World War struggles.

The War in the Pacific

[58:55]

Finally we have the war in the Pacific. A war that begins with Japan's sort of bid to create an economic empire in East and Southeast Asia and which ends ultimately with the triumph of United States naval power and the subjugation of Japan to American reconstruction.

Effects of the Second World War

[59:21]

How did these wars shape the postwar world?

Superficially the map of the world in 1945 does not look dissimilar from the map of the world in 1939.

We might, if we just look at the political geography, see the result of the Second World War as a return more or less to the status quo ante, to the way things were before the war began.

This, I would argue, would be a really superficial reading of the wars geopolitical consequences. The war is utterly transformative. It devastates France and Britain, previously both of which had ranked amongst the world's great powers↗. It devastates Japan, East Asia's rising power, and it leaves the United States and the Soviet Union as the world's two dominant powers.

Shift of Power From Europe to the United States and the Soviet Union

[60:19]

For about three or four centuries European international relations, which is almost but not quite to say the world's international relations, had operated according to a system of power politics in which a handful of great powers had balanced each other, fought wars against each other, with the effect that no single power was able to dominate the international system as a whole.

The Second World War brings this era of European great power politics to a dramatic end. All that is left are the two superpowers. Nobody else really counts in 1945 in terms of their military and strategic capacities.

Divergent Experiences from the Second World War

[61:06]

But there are other profound legacies to the Second World War besides the geopolitical ones.

Let's remember that the Second World War produces very divergent experiences for the people who wage it. The Second World War that Americans fight and experience is not the Second World War that Russians fight and experience, and it's very, very important to remember that if we want to grasp the politics of the postwar era.

Our war is not their war. And their war is not somebody else's war. How do we illustrate this? It would take a long time to do it at any level of satisfactory detail. But let's just look at the really big picture. How are the wars ultimate burdens distributed? Who dies in the Second World War and where?

The war's human death toll is concentrated overwhelming in two countries -- in the Soviet Union and China. And this is a fact that has really really important consequences for postwar history.

And you might say as you gaze at these numbers appalling as they are that China and the Soviet Union were big countries. Of course their death tolls were going to be higher. Perhaps.

Let's look at the death tolls...

I'm sorry.

(Student Question)

No, this figure which shows a death toll of about 23 million of the Soviet Union includes only deaths that are attributable to the Second World War. It does not include the victims of the Ukrainian Famine↗ or of Stalin's purges↗.

We'll talk about those in a different lecture.

Let's look at war deaths not in terms of the absolute numbers but rather as percentages of the pre-war populations of the afflicted countries.

And here the picture looks somewhat different but the indelible fact remains for the Soviet Union which loses almost 15% of its population in the Second World War. The experience of war is a truly catastrophic and harrowing one. Only one country, one big country, experiences the Second World War more severely than did the Soviet Union and that of course is Poland. The country that is invaded by Hitler in 1939 and ends up being subjected to the Red Army at the war's end.

The burdens of war are unequally distributed. Many more Germans, Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs, and Chinese die in the Second World War than do Americans or Britains.

Just contemplate the view from Times Square↗ in August 1945 and the view of the Potsdamer Platz↗ Berlin's Times Square around the same time.

V-J Day in Times Square

The Potsdamer Platz at the end of the Second World War

The legacies of the war for ordinary men and women are very, very different.

But it's not just the catastrophe of war that leaves a lasting impact. Might also think about the legacies of the war's economic mobilization. You might think about the legacies of political developments during the Second World War.

Some of these themes also bear serious consideration.

Economic Effects of the Second World War

[64:43]

Let's think about the economic mobilization for war.

The Second World War was fought to a large extent as a war of production. One of the reasons that the Allies prevailed was that the United States, the arsenal of democracy↗, as FDR put it, was able to produce more war equipment, more tanks, guns, and planes faster than could anybody else.

American war industries produced bombers and ships on a vast scale. They did this really succinctly because they applied the principles of production line assembly↗ to the tasks of war production. Something which had never before been done.

Expansion of the Public Sector Throughout the World

[65:29]

Mobilization for the Second World War involves an unprecedented expansion of the public sector. This occurs in every single country that fights the Second World War except the Soviet Union where the public sector had already expanded to its maximum extent in the 1930s. But in Germany in Great Britain and in the United States and elsewhere the Second World War involves burgeoning of government.

Just look at the changes in federal spending in the United States as a fraction of GDP. During the New Deal Roosevelt spent money, much faster than any previous government had in peacetime. Federal spending as a fraction of GDP begins to approach 10% in the 1930s.

But in the 1940s with the Second World War federal spending just shoots up to unprecedented levels. Government spending begins to approach 40, 45% of gross domestic product. This is a leviathan state the likes of which the United States has never before seen.

And the American experience is not unusual. All of the war's belligerents tax and spend in order to wage the war.

Often taxes are not sufficient pay for the war. And if taxes won't pay for the war what will? Debt. The United States runs systemic budget deficits during the Second World War in order to pay for the war. So do other belligerent governments.

And this is really, really consequential. The experience of the Second World War compounds the experience of the Great Depression. If the Great Depression saw a sort of unprecedented expansion of the public sector in peacetime the Second World War takes that public sector and makes it much, much bigger than it had grown even in the 1930s. It creates what you might characterize as a leviathan state.

And some people see this a really positive thing. After all, FDR struggled to solve the Great Depression in the 1930s. Keynesian economists argued that even the deficit spending that the New Deal did, which actually wasn't very much, was insufficient to the magnitude of the problem.

It's not the New Deal but the Second World War that ultimately ends the Great Depression. You see an unprecedented marshaling of public resources for the purposes of waging the war which as a consequence end up restoring full employment in the United States. Only with the Second World War, only with the advent of massive government contracts for the manufacture of munitions will the Great Depression come to an end.

Friedrich Hayek and The Road to Serfdom

[68:27]

Some people see this as troubling. The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek↗ publishes a book in 1944 titled The Road to Serfdom↗. And it argues that the concentration of economic power in the hands of the state is a profoundly troubling development. Hayek argues that, while he acknowledges that there are key differences between the United States and its fascist adversary Nazi Germany, he argues that the accumulation of economic resources in the hands of the state will lead ultimately to the creation of a tyrannical or authoritarian regime.

We'll talk more about Hayek and his influence later on in the semester.

So far as the 1940s are concerned the key point about Hayek is that very few people listen to him. Hayek warns that the excessive concentration of economic power in the hands of the state is a bad thing. But in the 1940s Hayek is a voice in the wilderness. Most professional economists align with Keynes and see the expansion of the public sector as a benign development that will stabilize the capitalist system.

Conclusion: Expansion of the Public Sector Throughout the World

[69:40]

So that's one really important legacy of war mobilization. It sort of consecrates the emergence of the public sector in the economy.

Technological Effects of the Second World War

[69:49]

It's not all that the war leaves behind. It also leaves gargantuan technological legacies -- none more impressive than the atomic bomb.

The Atomic Bomb

[69:58]

Of course the creation of the atomic bomb itself involves a massive exertion of public resources. The Manhattan Project↗ employs about a 150,000 people all of whom are government employees.

This is bigger than any government enterprise that had previously existed in all of the history of the United States.

And of course it produces the first detonation of an atomic device in July 1945↗ -- a detonation that will have profound consequences for the geopolitics of the postwar world.

But the atomic bomb is not the only technological legacy of the Second World War. The Second World War leaves a host of technological legacies that will shape the world that we inhabit today.

Jet Engines

[70:42]

Jet engines were first developed in the 1930s but they did not fly until 1939. The Second World War greatly accelerates the application of Jet engine↗ jet technology to the purposes of aviation. With the consequence that by the 1950s ordinary people can take flights on passenger jets. Presumably would not have happened without the Second World War -- a episode that accelerates the application of scientific innovation to military and ultimately civilian purposes.

Radar

[71:17]

There are other really important innovations. Radar↗, developed by the British to help intercept incoming German bombers and fighter planes, it will in the postwar era help to make possible a complex infrastructure for civilian aviation.

Penicillin

[71:35]

Penicillin↗ is discovered in 1928 but it's not mass produced until the early 1940s. Why is it mass produced in the early 1940s? It's mass produced in order to help treat the wounds of soldiers.

But by 1945 it's available for purchase by ordinary citizens, initially in the United States, subsequently elsewhere.

Penicillin has huge, huge consequences. It means that ordinary men, women and children no longer die from simple infections. It's a big deal.

Nylon

[72:05]

There are other technologies too. Nylon↗ is discovered in 1935 but it's not until the war that it is applied, that it begins to be mass produced. It's used initially to make parachutes but it has sort of consequences for fashion and consumer tastes after the war has been won.

Race Relations in the United States After the Second World War

[72:28]

The war has consequences for race relations in the United States. How do you wage a war for democracy and human rights while denying human rights to a tenth of your population at home, right? The hypocrisy lingers and it helps to animate and inform the civil rights movement↗ in the United States.

More than the hypocrisy perhaps, the example of Hitler's racial tyranny in Europe, the Holocaust, helps to discredit racism as a legitimate ideological construct. It's really important to remember that before the Second World War it wasn't a bad thing to be a racist. Racists could hold appointment at major research universities. And they could publish sort of ludicrous books that offered complex racial geographies of the world that commented on the aptitude of particular peoples for particular tasks.

If you want to you can go back to look at the examinations that were offered in geography at elite private universities in the United States and Great Britain in the 1920s, and you'll be really troubled by the questions that were asked.

The Second World War doesn't eliminate racism but it helps to begin the process of discrediting racism as a kind of legitimate frame of belief.

United Nations Statement on Race

[73:51]

One example of this is a a report that the United Nations publishes in 1950 called the race question↗. It's a report that is authored by some of the most distinguished anthropologists and biologists in the world and it offers a very powerful conclusion that race is essentially a biological fiction and that racism is wrong.

This is the first time that a major international organization will sort of go on record as denouncing racism as prima facie↗ false. We should remember that the League of Nations by contrast had sort of assimilated itself to the realities of racism that still existed very powerfully in the world of the 1920s. That's one consequence.

The Rise of the Left in Europe

[74:37]

The rise of the left↗ in Europe and elsewhere is another powerful consequence of the Second World War. Whereas as the right↗ disgraces itself by its accommodation with fascism the left distinguishes itself through wartime resistance.

The Soviet example is a valiant one and only bolsters the prestige of the left in the world of the 1940s. We'll talk more about the rise of the left when we talk about the origins of the Cold War, but we should remember that the Second World War brings with it really profound ideological and political consequences which have to do with sort of the discrediting of the right, of the forces of conservatism, and with the rise of the popular ascendancy of the left.

In the elections that are held in France subsequent to the liberation in 1945 the Communists and the Socialists together win a majority.

Institutional Framework of the Postwar Settlement

[75:31]

Let's talk for a couple of minutes at the very end (this was intentionally designed to be brief) about the sort of institutional legacies of the Second World War.

So far we've talked about the economic and technological and political legacies of the war. What about the international institutions that the leaders of the world's powerful states, particularly the United States, create in order to regulate and guide the postwar order?

The creation of new international orders at the end of major wars is hardly unprecedented. The First World War ends with the creation of the League of Nations. The Second World War ends with the creation of the United Nations.

What shapes the character of such peace settlements? Obviously it's the distribution of power in the international system at the end of the war and the preferences of the dominant power.

It is the United States in 1945 that is the dominant power from its position of dominance it creates a new sort of institutional framework for managing the affairs of the postwar world.

The institutions which we're going to talk about much more as the semester progresses are myriad but the most important ones are the Bretton Woods economic institutions↗ and the United Nations↗ as a political framework for organizing the affairs of the postwar world.

Restoration of International Trade

[76:54]

The Bretton Woods system, and I'm going to talk, probably spend a whole lecture in a couple of weeks talking about how it works, essentially tries to accomplish two things. The first thing that it tries to do is to accomplish or to orchestrate a restoration of international trade.

Insofar as the 1930s saw a total breakdown of international trade, an embrace of autarkic↗ solutions by governments, the Bretton Woods Institutions try to restore the basic framework of multilateral free trade.

Accommodate the Rise of the Public Sector

[77:30]

But they try to do a second thing too. And this is to accommodate the rise of the public sector that occurs during the 1930s. The Bretton Woods Institutions try to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable things: liberal free trade on the one hand, and the rise of economic statism↗ of states that try to manage and regulate and protect their own national economies on the other.

The Bretton Woods system will be fairly successful in its effort to reconcile liberal trade and the rise of the public sector for about 30 years. And we're going to talk much more about how Bretton Woods worked and why it came unstuck in due course.

The International Monetary Fund and The World Bank

[78:16]

Just in case you're not familiar with the technical aspects: the two sort of major institutional components of the Bretton Woods order will be the International Monetary Fund↗ and the World Bank↗.

But we're going to talk about all of this in due course so you don't need to worry about taking notes.

The United Nations

[78:31]

Last thing: the United Nations. The United Nations emerges as a sort of international organization in which all of the governments of the world are represented. It comes out of two conferences. The first convened at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington in 1944↗. The second held at San Francisco in 1945↗. The United Nations as all of you know includes a number of institutional apparatus, apparatuses, the General Assembly represents all of the nation-states of the world according to the principle one nation, one vote. The Security Council represents the interests of the powerful states. It gives them a special role in the preservation of international peace and security.

Besides these two core institutions the UN includes a Secretariat which is a little bit like the executive branch of the United Nations and a number of specialist agencies like UNESCO.

Human Rights and Human Hopes

[79:31]

One last thing. The international order that the United Nations consecrates is an international order that has to do primarily with nation-states. It represents nation-states and it propounds to defend peace in a world of nation-states. But of course nation-states are not all that there is in the world. History begins not with nation-states but with ordinary men and women.

And Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War understood this. And he talked, when he talked about the character of the postwar order, he talked not only about peace as an objective for which the war would have to be fought and won but also about human rights. FDR insisted that the postwar world would be one in which the human rights of ordinary people would be honored and respected.

One of the great challenges that we'll exist for the architects of the postwar order is constructing an international system which will be able simultaneously to assure peace in a world of nation-states and to protect and defend the human rights of individuals.

Because insofar as individuals are ultimately accountable to their states and states ultimately accountable to individuals what role can an international organization have in protecting the interests and rights of individual men and women?

That's the question on which I would like to leave this lecture. The world ends, the world war ends in 1945, with the consecration of a new interstate order, yet the experience of war has raised the aspirations of ordinary men and women. It's raised their expectations. They now expect a certain modicum of economic well-being. They yearn for freedom -- even perhaps for justice.

What can be the relationship of the big international institutions that the war produces to those very fundamental, very elemental human hopes?