Stillbirth of a world order: Union internationalism from war to Cold War in the United States and Britain, 1939-1949

The strange alliance between the western capitalist powers and the Soviet Union in World War II stimulated a period of intense international creativity. Notable among the hopeful products of this time was the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), founded in 1945, which united communist, liberal, Social-Democratic and business unionists in an effort to establish a democratic world system. The chill of the Cold War quickly put an end to any hope for a unified working-class voice in world affairs, with the WFTU splitting along Communist/anti-Communist lines in 1949. This study of the background of the World Federation explores the relation between political and social movements and the seemingly remote sphere of international relations. Joining diplomatic, social, and political history, the dissertation uncovers one of the lost opportunities of mid-century diplomacy: the institutionalization of the cooperative spirit of the Grand Alliance. By tracing the growing ideological conflicts in international union affairs, it also sheds light on the popular bases of the Cold War.; In the mid-1940s world politics seemed on the verge of a vast transformation which would usher in a new era of global cooperation. By the end of the decade, however, few could entertain such hopes. This dissertation compares the intellectual and social processes which encouraged Americans and Britons to believe in and work for a new world order based on union participation in heretofore elite realms. It examines both popular perceptions and union politics to discover how unionists came to accept Communist participation in the international side of their movement. The substance of the work begins with studies of working-class attitudes toward the USSR and world politics. It then details the political and diplomatic sources of labor internationalism in the US and the UK. In the conclusion, a comparison of American and British anti-communism provides the starting point for a synthetic interpretation of the origins of the Cold War and of that conflict's effects on the internal politics of the United States and Great Britain.