World History

Unit 7: The World Since 1945

Chapter 28: Europe and North America in the Postwar Years

59. Thu, Apr 10, 2014

Folded into these questions of foreign policy are a number of other interesting pieces on domestic policy in the United States and Canada. Such things as the Civil Rights Movement seem oddly dissimilar to many of the other matters that come up here, but it’s not clear where else such things could have been placed. I’ve deliberately made today’s session somewhat shorter — focusing on just one of the four sections of the chapter — so we can try to gather up some of the threads.

At the risk of coming full circle, it might be useful to plug in some of the concepts we trotted out at the beginning of the year — especially basic concepts of law, the notions of power (auctoritas, imperium, potestas, vis, ius), and so on. Where do they fit into the questions we are looking at here? Does the fact that both the Korea and the Vietnam conflicts were not declared as wars, but were explained as “police actions” say about our evolving ideas of law? Is there really such a thing as international law? If so, on whose authority is it established and promulgated? Who enforces it and how? (This question can also encompass some of the things that came up last time about the Nuremberg trials.)

The rise and ascendency of Sen. Joe McCarthy is a fascinating episode in our history as well. It was a polarizing incident at the time, and left lingering consequences that are still being felt on the international, as well as the domestic, stage. It was the golden age of conspiracy theory: McCarthy seemed to see communist infiltrators in every part of the United States government, and he went out of his way to try to hunt them down. His methods got more extreme and his regard for due process less and less reliable. He was eventually brought down. in the decades that followed, almost any suspicion of communism was dismissed (in certain circles, at least) as a kind of return of McCarthyism. What is intriguing, based on many documents that were declassified and released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is the fact that McCarthy was probably correct in his general suspicions. There seem to have been at least as many Soviet agents highly placed in the United States government as he thought there were — not mere sympathizers with the Soviet cause, or aging Wobblies (IWW), but genuine paid agents of the Kremlin. And McCarthy managed to identify not a single one of them.

• The Nuremberg Trials and the advocacy for international “police actions” as in Vietnam, Korea, and eventually Iraq, suggest that there is some right whereby one state may intervene in the affairs of another. How does the idea of natural or divine law intersect with the positive laws of states?
• How does civil disobedience — which came up with Thoreau, Gandhi, and King — intersect with the ideas of a law-abiding state? Where are the boundaries between the proper observation of national law and acquiescence to or toleration of injustice? Can those questions always be solved? What are the consequences when they are not?
• What are the implications of national separatism in the case of, say, Quebec? Where does one draw the boundaries around the nationalistic impulse? Along language lines? Something else? This is the kind of question echoed around the world today — ranging from the question of whether the Southern states had the right to secede from the United States in the 1860s to the potential for establishing a Kurdish state today (something that both Turkey and Iraq would vigorously resist). What about countries like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which were swallowed up for a couple of generations by the Soviet Union?

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