Public Symposium will Address ‘Freedom, War and World Peace’

Renowned scholars will lecture on American foreign relations regarding the ideals of the Marquis de Lafayette April 21

In honor of the Marquis de Lafayette’s 250th anniversary celebration, the history department is sponsoring a public symposium titled “Freedom, War and World Peace” at 8 p.m. April 21 in Kirby Hall of Civil Rights room 104. Arnold Offner, Cornelia F. Hugel Professor of History, explains that the purpose of the symposium is to “enlighten members of the Lafayette College community about the intellectual and political roots of American foreign policy.”

A web site dedicated to the celebration and to the Marquis’ unique connection to the College provides information and updates.
The symposium will feature a panel of three renowned scholars in American foreign relations and political history including Offner and William R. Keylor and Andrew J. Bacevich, both professors of international relations and history at Boston University. Each will share a 20 minute paper followed by a discussion with the audience.
Keylor will share a paper titled “From Lafayette’s Rights of Man to Wilson’s Right of Self Determination.” His paper will talk about the Marquis de Lafayette’s dedication to natural human rights and freedom and the rapport of his perspective with President Woodrow Wilson’s emphasis on the right to national self-determination and security for all people and nations.

Following him, Offner will lecture on “From FDR’s Four Freedoms to Bush’s War on Terror.” In doing so, he will examine Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 Four Freedoms speech, which centered on the freedoms of speech and worship, freedoms from hunger and fear, and emphasized global disarmament and international foreign policy. He will then discuss how these views have been “transformed or violated by the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of 2002 that has put emphasis on America’s need to maintain military superiority over all nations and to strike unilaterally and preventively at any threat, no matter how remote.”

Finally, Bacevich will share “American Empire, American Freedom.” The paper will investigate the merging of America’s belief in the universality if its ideals with unmatched military force in order to turn United States foreign policy into that of a “militant crusader state” determined to make the rest of the world like America. He will discuss the follow-through on this policy “even as [it] has increasingly angered most of the rest of the world and caused America to become increasingly isolated.”

Robert I. Weiner, Thomas Roy and Laura Forrest Jones Professor of History, will mediate the discussion.

Keylor received a Ph.D. and M.A. and from Columbia University and a B.A. from Stanford University. He is the director of the International History Institute at Boston University. His six published books on French history and international relations include: A World of Nations: The International Order since 1945 (2003) and The Legacy of the Great War: Peacemaking, 1919 (1997).

Offner earned a Ph. D. from Indiana University and a B.A. from Columbia University. He is past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His books include American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938 (1969), The Origins of the Second World War: American Foreign Policy and World Politics, 1917-1941 (1986), and Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953 (2002).

Bacevich is a graduate of West Point and earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University after retiring from the United States army at the rank of Colonel. He is the former director of at Boston University’s Center for International Relations. He has taught at Johns Hopkins University and West Point and is a highly esteemed author and public commentator. Among his books are The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005), and American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (2002).