4 September 2023 - Sovereignty and the Economy in the Founding of America's Postwar Order

4 September 2023 (AEST), 9:00 - 10:00 am, Virtual

"Sovereignty & the Economy in the Founding of America's Postwar Order"
Professor Afroditi Giovanopoulou (Florida State University).

In the early twentieth century, intense contests over power and authority in the United States caused significant transformations in the way that the international category of sovereignty was perceived. This questioning of state power took place in two distinct contexts: the “labor question,” on the one hand, and the legal management of settler colonialism and empire, on the other. This interplay between the legal pluralism of empire and that of industrial relations, both of which portrayed sovereign authority as diffuse, malleable and pluralistic, informed the founding of our current international order at the end of World War II. Much like property, mid-century New Deal lawyers rebranded sovereignty as a flexible building block that was open to international regulation. In their efforts to bring about social and economic change, however, early twentieth century jurists had expressed a bifurcated approach toward the state. They promoted more pluralistic arrangements within civil society, antagonistic to the authority of the state, and, at the same time, greater bureaucratic efficiency and centralization. New Deal lawyers mirrored this bifurcated approach in their designs for postwar peace: they institutionalized a consolidated, centralized, executive “warfare” state at home alongside more diffuse and experimental sovereign arrangements abroad. In the domain of the economy, they maintained a deformalized approach to sovereignty but abandoned the earlier, concomitant agenda for social and economic justice. Torn between fidelity to a strong executive state and to a pluralist international society, and reduced to a “compensatory” economic vision, the postwar settlement carried within it a series of compromises that we encounter to this day.

Image: President Roosevelt departs Washington on a voyage that includes urging support of New Deal candidates in upcoming elections. July 7 1938. Source: Library of Congress