The goal of the administration was to not only increase the responsibilities and
capabilities of the United Nations, but also to constitute a new order that would attempt to use the United Nations as a mediator of the interaction between states. This strategy imposed several constraints. First, the Soviet Union and members of their voting bloc were perceived to be working through all potential avenues to limit the effectiveness of the United Nations in all of its capacities. Harlan Cleveland in a memo to Secretary of State Rusk argued that those nations sought a UN “limited to debate.”8 Further, the “size and power are limited,” Cleveland claimed,
“by those who think international operations are dangerous to their national interests.”9
8 This memo was included in the briefing book that President Kennedy took with him to Hyannisport to more fully prepare for this address and it is therefore likely that he read the memo (United States Strategy at the Sixteenth General Assembly: Tab A, 1961).
9 Within the context of 1961, Cleveland is referring to Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s efforts to expand the ability of the United Nations to provide for the collective security of nations through the intervention of peacekeeping operations, particularly in the Congo. These operations were deemed to be a violation of sovereignty, and both the Soviet Union and France refused to pay their dues or provide technical support (Bederman, 2002; 60).
Certainly, questions of sovereignty were at play, but so too were limitations imposed by a nation’s decision to provide fiscal, military and technical support, which would necessarily trade off with the ability to use those resources at home or elsewhere abroad. A second constraint, imposed by the Western Alliance, required the president to stand firm against the aggression of Khrushchev while avoiding the perception of provocation which could upset the careful balance that the Soviet Union and the United States were maintaining, particularly in Berlin.10 A third constraint was the membership itself. The Cleveland memo also noted that those nations which would be considered ‘neutral’ or ‘non-aligned’ – the nations from whom the administration was seeking assent – were limited by their power and experience. These nations could often only cast a vote, with ambassadors who wielded little to no power over policy in their home nations, and as such their “delegations are often manned by men of limited expertise and correspondingly limited sense of responsibility for use of that vote.” The challenge, then, was manifold. The speech needed to be able to instill a specific set of values that could develop a responsibility among inexperienced members while avoiding the paternalism of the faltering colonialist bonds these states were seeking to free themselves from. The expansion of a role for the United Nations in multilateral diplomacy would have to be carefully justified through proposals that were
specific to the initial mission of the Charter.
Political opportunities and constraints are an ever present concern for rhetoricians. But where we might expect political and institutional constraints to narrow the field for rhetorical
10 The first draft of the address for the UNGA, authored by Ambassador Stevenson (September 12, 1961), took a hard line against the Soviet Union. It accuses the Soviet Union of engaging in a series of provocation from the resumption of nuclear testing, boasting of the intention to build a 100 megaton bomb, and threatening to turn orange groves into a “radioactive wasteland.” These accusations were indeed supported by facts, yet stylistically such an onslaught would only encourage a vigorous and retaliatory response from the Soviet Union. These specific accusations are not included in the final speech: the approach was likely abandoned because it ran contrary to the primary goals of shifting UNGA debate towards the proposals of the U.S. and for Kennedy to appear as a reasonable leader.
decisions, in this context, we find the inverse to be true. The fact that all nations have their own interests is something that is shared between them. That all nations value sovereignty and
increasingly were coming to support self-determination on a global level was yet another point of consensus. The danger from these positions is not chaos, but rather the chaos that could ensue should nations not have an outlet by which their interests could be voiced, concerns addressed, and their problems resolved without the use of force. Through this prism, then, the United
Nations becomes an essential institution to the functioning of both global and local cultures. This political diversity – and anticipating outcomes that could emerge should the world move away from international political institutions – provides a strong warrant for why nations should work together to ensure that international forums like the United Nations are successful. Of course, we return to the initial problem: that international institutions (especially in 1961), struggled to act precisely because a consensus about what the role of these institutions in international politics should be. The demands of the situation required Kennedy to provide justifications for a particular set of characteristics, unique to the United Nations, that justified expansion in each case related to the specific U.S. proposal.
Establishing a respect for the shared similarity of discordance premised on difference presents the administration with a value that can be leveraged when constituting a new political order. McGhee, in the previously cited memo, noted that the vision of the administration to
“build a free world community” must be built on the understanding that each nation should make political calculations, “according to its own desires, while at the same time shielding its members against outside threats and pressures.” Adherence to two seemingly disparate presumptions about the nation-state produces a specific tension related to sovereignty. On the one hand, every state has the right to self-determination and on the other, a degree of freedom must be relinquished in
order to promote international stability, especially when the result of individual decision-making could result in the exchange of nuclear weapons. Yet, it is precisely this tension that opens up productive space for cosmopolitan rhetorical appeals and deliberation.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (2006) posit that argumentation produces adherence when a particular or set of notions inform epistemology. The deployment of evidence in an argument is a double move, justifying a particular interpretation of events, ideas or the like, as well as providing qualifications (taken here to mean both its quality and characteristics) for that evidence. This double move of interpretation and qualification is referred to as an argumentative notion. Empirically, these notions contribute to the creation of an epistemological system:
“notions appear also as data on which one thinks one can depend on and on which one depends indeed effectively.” In other words, notions are the conclusions not just about what counts as evidence but also how and when that evidence can be used within a particular logic system. The keen observation of interest here is that notions are inherently ambiguous – the context in which the notions of freedom are deployed will influence the range of interpretations and qualifications that can be used to support a particular argument. It is this ambiguity inherent to argumentative notion that produces flexibility for the rhetor. Within the international political context of 1961, we can see precisely such notions in operation when the President discusses peace. As I argue in the first chapter, peace operates as an ultimate term in the United Nations, but peace as an argumentative notion preserves an ambiguity that allows the president flexibility to justify policies that on face may appear to be at odds. Peace is qualified by its relationship to the use of force. When Kennedy speaks about the problem of Berlin, he deploys notions of strength to preserve peace. He suggests that to draw down armaments protecting West Berlin would certainly result in adventurism where the implied actor would be the German Democratic
Republic or the Soviet Union. Thus, peace (dependent upon conflict that produces a stalemate) is preserved by demonstrations of military strength that result in conventional (as opposed to nuclear) deterrence. However, the opposite is true when dealing with disarmament. Here, peace is jeopardized by the continued testing and development of both weapons and delivery systems.
Peace, the necessary precursor to the survival of humanity, could be undone by either accident or miscalculation when demonstrations of strength produce technical failures or a misinterpretation of military intent (exercise from actual invasion or first strike). Diplomatic cosmopolitanism as a logic system then provides a series of notions each with their own ambiguities which allow them to be applied in specific contexts.
This understanding of adherence through argumentative notion helps us to further
understand how cosmopolitan appeals operate within presidential public address. Unsurprisingly, the United States does not have a rhetorical monopoly on what I previously discovered were ultimate terms including: freedom, peace, justice and responsibility. Many speakers deploy these terms in the General Assembly. As such, the meaning of these terms – as a result of their
inherent ambiguity – depends on the logic structure in which they are used. And as previously noted, the Kennedy administration needed to rhetorically constitute a new vision for the organization precisely because the Soviet Union had come to dominate the previous General Assembly with its own proposals and thus notions about what the United Nations was and could be. These notions about the UN had been appropriated within the logic system of communism by the Soviet Union and its allies. Fortunately for the Kennedy administration, ambiguity allows for rhetors to “change the meaning of a notion,” by placing it within a different context which allows the speaker to “integrate it [the changed notion] in new lines of argument” (Perelman &
Olbrechts-Tyteca, 2006, p. 134-5). And this is precisely the move that the President makes. The
exigence of the Charter in San Francisco was to prevent the reformation of alliances and
rearmament that would cause nations to be drawn into another devastating world war. Kennedy argues that this is no longer the exigency that should drive the United Nations role in
international politics: bipolarity and deterrence premised on mutually assured destruction should prevent conventional war. But this fragile peace is qualified by the risk of nuclear holocaust as a result of accident or miscalculation. The new exigence is, “a nuclear disaster, spread by wind and water and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the uncommitted and uncommitted alike.” Kennedy (1961b) concludes this passage with the observation that,
“Mankind must put an end to war – or war will put an end to mankind.” To stave off nuclear holocaust, then, requires “new strength and new roles for the United Nations,” which Kennedy proposes would operate within a robust international framework of disarmament which would include new treaties (both for nuclear testing of warheads and delivery vehicles as well as peaceful uses of outer space) coupled with the capabilities to observe and verify these efforts at the national level. These are the ‘positive’ proposals of the U.S. designed to win the ‘peace race,’
but they also provide the notional qualifications by which expansion of the United Nations could be grounded. Kennedy seeks to amplify these notions by claiming that, “the events and decisions of the next ten months may well decide the fate of man for the next ten thousand years,” adding,
“There will be no avoiding those events…no appeal from these decisions.” The choice, then, is presented as a metaphor: “the problem is the life of this organization,” which will “either grow to meet the challenges of our age, or it will be gone with the wind without influence, without force and without respect.” Kennedy concludes this passage by asserting, “were we to let it die…we would condemn our future.” By shifting the notional ground of context via the assertion of a new exigence for the international community, and by ascribing all nations as both equally effected
by and responsible for a possible catastrophic outcome, Kennedy is both able to offer positive justifications for the United Nations and the negative consequences for not doing so.
In 1961, Kennedy argues that the General Assembly must proactively work to reduce the threat of global nuclear holocaust, and he uses cosmopolitan notions of the Charter and global responsibility to construct an argumentative notion that justifies expansion of the power and responsibility of the United Nations as a force in international politics. The use of notions, grounded in cosmopolitanism, assisted in making a case that reinforced U.S. policy prerogatives, as demonstrated by the archival record. Yet Kennedy was not about to let a good crisis go to waste. This was also an opportunity for him to further elaborate upon the state of bipolarity and the nature of the Soviet Union to carve out political space in the United Nations where a
“community of free nations” could pursue their strategic interests. I now move from the more ambiguous sections of the speech to analyze cosmopolitan rhetorical forms that gird specific attacks against the Soviet Union.
3.3 Argument Forms: Cosmopolitan Linkages in Association, Scapegoating and