Session Abstract

The decades after World War II witnessed the rise of the United States to a position of global power unparalleled in its history. In the past, scholars have generally interpreted that ascension through the lens of the Cold War and the bipolar superpower conflict it engendered. More recently, however, historians have revisited the early postwar period, before the world fell into the grip of the Cold War, and they have identified it as a moment of contingency, when alternative ambitions, often grounded in the spirit of liberal internationalism, were articulated and acted upon. This panel returns to those years of uncertainty and flux, in order to rethink the nature of U.S. global power and the making of the postwar order. But rather than treating the postwar moment as a brief window onto an alternate trajectory, or as the staging ground for the rise of the Cold War, the papers on this panel argue that those years saw the rise of new forms of internationalism that laid the groundwork for the projection of U.S. global power in numerous arenas, including the Cold War but also the global decolonization movement and the growth of international institutions.  

Daniel Immerwahr’s paper describes the relinquishment of territorial power by the United States in the immediate postwar period and argues for a relationship between U.S. informal empire, the burgeoning Cold War, and the broader decolonization movement. Sam Lebovic’s paper traces U.S. efforts to create a global flow of free information from the United Nations moment to the early Cold War, and uses the ironic trajectory of these policies to reveal the close relationships between liberal universalism, nationalist exceptionalism, and geopolitical calculation in postwar American internationalism. Grace V. Leslie’s paper follows internationalist ideals into the 1950s and examines the efforts of U.S. historian, Caroline Ware, and her team of international collaborators, to write the twentieth-century volume of UNESCO’s world history and to accommodate challenges to the ideal of an international history from the Soviet Union.

Together, these papers reveal the new aspirations, pathways, and mechanisms of U.S. global power in the early postwar period, but they narrate neither the inevitable spread of liberal internationalism as America rose to global hegemony nor the replacement of that internationalism with the bipolar logic of the Cold War. Rather, by paying attention to the particular ways in which U.S. global ambitions intersected with and remade broader global transformations, the papers recover visions and practices of mid-century internationalism that have been forgotten. They suggest continuities between domains of the international order that are normally treated in isolation – connecting the histories of internationalist institutions and imaginaries, superpower conflict, decolonization, territorial expansion, and soft power. And they show that liberal aspirations and geopolitical ambitions were intertwined in U.S. internationalism in complex, ironic, and novel ways.