The Nation — October 30, 2017

48 The Nation. October 30, 2017

system as a system. And it is undeniable that
the system as such tolerates a continuing set
of injustices and evils.”
Schlesinger may have happily dined with
the Clintons, but Clinton’s policies during his
first term—welfare reform, in particular—
“infuriated and depressed” him, and by 1996
he had “resolved to stop defending Clinton
in the future.” Unlike FDR and the New
Dealers, who took a progressive stand and
forced the fight on that line, Clinton and
the New Democrats allowed the center of
American politics to move to the right.
Schlesinger always paired the moral pes-
simism of Augustine and Niebuhr with a
surprising amount of faith in the possibilities
of history. It was not that he believed social
progress was inevitable, but that he liked to
emphasize the good in the midst of the bad.
This historical sanguinity was what led him
to elide the racism and violence of Jacksonian
democracy and to subdue any skepticism he
might have had about the opportunism of
both FDR and JFK. It was this “politics of
hope”—a phrase that he used to title a book
on the New Frontier—that also allowed him
to argue in the Reagan years that American
history cycled between a politics of progress
and affirmative government and one of re-
gress and chaos. In the face of all that was rot-
ten, the good may yet still arise. Schlesinger
never abandoned this politics of hope, but he
did begin to worry about the power politics
and realism upon which it relied.
Two of his last pieces before his death in
2007 seemed to capture his growing despair.
Both were on jaded liberal action- intellectuals:
the editor and novelist William Dean Howells
and the historian Henry Adams. Having spent
the first half of their lives in the thrall of Re-
publican reform, they had, by the late 19th
century, found themselves repulsed by its cor-
ruption and excesses. Howells felt particularly
anguished over the four Haymarket anar-
chists who were hanged for crimes they didn’t
commit (a fifth killed himself in jail). Adams,
whose grandfather and great-grandfather had
been presidents, soured on the crude inter-
twining of money and politics in Gilded Age
Washington and abandoned the city and its
politics to teach history at Harvard.
Both spent the last years of their lives
increasingly distraught over the trajectory
of their own liberal ideals. After Haymar-
ket, Schlesinger wrote, Howells “tried to
get other writers to join in condemning a
palpable miscarriage of justice,” but “no
one came along...and [he] was denounced
by the respectable press.” Of Adams’s disen-
chantment, Schlesinger was more succinct:
“What had gone wrong?” Q

E

very year, the United Nations General

Assembly descends upon New York

City, bringing with it traffic jams,

crowded subways, diplomatic mishaps,

and, in recent years, some tens of mil-

lions’ worth of public spending. Given the

trouble—and today, a president whose only

real interest in foreign policy seems to be

alienating other nations—it’s hard to be-

lieve that ordinary Americans once saw the

prospect of hosting the UN in their country

as a benefit, not a costly liability.

Yet that was the prevailing sentiment in

1945, when the organization was searching

for a place to settle. It was a different time:

The men and women whom today’s right-

wing politicians revile as “globalists” enjoyed

a slightly more flattering profile. Intellectuals

were more inclined to condemn nationalism

strongly and without hesitation, calling it

“power-hunger tempered by self-deception”

(Orwell) or “an infantile disease...the measles

of mankind” (Einstein). World peace was

largely deemed a cause worthy of intellectual

inquiry and charitable giving, rather than the

subject of resigned shrugs.

It was in this atmosphere, and from the

ashes of two world wars, that the United

Nations rose: if not a symbol of peace, then,

to paraphrase one of its architects, at least a

“workshop” for it. But rootless cosmopolitan-

ism isn’t particularly conducive to establishing

a functional bureaucracy, so the UN had

to go in search of a “forever” home—and

by ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN

INTERNATIONAL TERRITORY

Three new books map the ambiguities of the UN’s extraterritorial status

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a journalist and the

author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the

Global Citizen.

ILLUSTRATION BY TIM ROBINSON