In the long span of American history, two moments stand out for their
creative refashioning of the political order. The first comprises the
framing, ratification, and amendment of the Federal Constitution from
1787 to 1790; the second, the creation of the system linking the
United States with the advanced industrial democracies after the
Second World War. The first incarnation of the American system lasted
from 1789 until 1861, when its tensions exploded in a great war that
brought it to an end. The second incarnation still endures; indeed,
we are now commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the institutions
and programs--Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization --most closely identified with it.

It may seem odd to consider these two political associations
together, for there are crucial differences between them--in the
character of their institutions, in the political loyalties held by
the men and women within them, and in the equality (or inequality) of
their members. But there are also remarkable affinities. Both
creations aimed to establish something called "ordered liberty",
substituting the rule of law for the "empire of force." Designed to
find a via media between the anarchy of states and a consolidated
empire (the two great poles along the spectrum of possibilities),
both creations nevertheless sought to safeguard the two values with
which each of these otherwise negative examples were closely
identified: the liberty of states and the preservation of peace and
order over an extended territory. This entailed the creation of a
union or federative system of large extent that could preserve peace
within its zone and ensure protection from aggression without. The
golden grail of this search was an association that could combine the
external force and order of a great empire with the internal freedoms
of a small republic.

We are accustomed to thinking of the United States as a single
political unit, and referring to it in the singular; before the Civil
War, however, the United States were styled in the plural. This new
order of the ages was far less centralized than historical
imagination now allows. Provided with a general government by the
Constitution, an institutional innovation which distinguished the
United States from all previous federacies in world history, it
nevertheless retained the purposes associated with the classic
confederation. The powers delegated to the general government, as
James Madison explained in Federalist No. 45, were "few and defined"
and would be exercised "principally on external objects, as war,
peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce." With standing military
forces of very small size, military power was concentrated in the
militia of the states and hence was radically decentralized. With no
common currency (something that the framers did not anticipate but
which nevertheless occurred), the monetary affairs of the Union were
often in a condition of anarchy. Until a fairly late period in its
development, inter-sectional trade was very slight. "Now", as Henry
Clay observed in 1820, "our connection is merely political. . . .
There is scarcely any of that beneficial intercourse, the best basis
of political connection, which consists in the exchange of the
produce of our labor."

The "Union of different republics" was described in a bewildering
variety of ways. It could be denounced as "a league with death and a
covenant with hell" and as "a most unequal alliance by which the
south has always been the loser and the north always the gainer."
More typically it was praised as "the last bulwark of our hope" that
stood frailly before surging tides of "disunion, anarchy, and civil
war." It was, as Madison insisted, a thing sui generis, "so
unexampled in its origin, so complex in its structure, and so
peculiar in some of its features, that in describing it the political
vocabulary does not furnish terms sufficiently distinctive and
appropriate, without a detailed resort to the facts of the case."

A similar observation may be made of the post-World War II American
system. It, too, acquired many names--"the American empire", "the
Free World", "the West", an "empire by invitation." At the core of
the post-World War II American system were NATO and the economic
institutions associated with the Bretton Woods regime. The fifty-odd
states that were ultimately brought into its bilateral and
multilateral security communities included colonial powers and
colonies, allies and enemies from the Second World War, democracies
and dictatorships. Over time, however, democratic norms and liberal
values took firm root within this second American system. This led
observers to grope again for a name that would capture its peculiar
character and specify its membership and boundaries. Plausible
candidates for the most apt description have included "the pacific
union of liberal democracies", the "zone of peace, wealth, and
democracy", a "civic union" embracing the United States, Western
Europe, and Japan whose members "increasingly appear to be separate
regions of the same political system rather than distinct ones." Some
observers give this community a restricted geographical scope,
largely confining it to the nations of Western Europe and North
America, while others speak more expansively of "the international
community" or, yet more extravagantly, of "one world." As the current
debates over NATO expansion, China policy, and the clash of
civilizations attest, how big this community is or might become
excites some of the most bitter controversies in the discussion of
American foreign policy.

Though some have shared Woodrow Wilson's dream that the American
system might become universal, it has never done so in fact. The
American system since the Second World War, like the one inaugurated
by the Constitution, has been a system of states within a larger
system of states. Our political vocabulary, with its stark antinomies
between "domestic" and "foreign", or "nation" and "world", fails to
capture the mixed character of the post-1789 and post-1947 systems,
both of which existed in a sort of twilight between the world of the
civil state and the world of international relations. Equally
unhelpful is the distinction drawn by political scientists between
"the unit level" and "the systemic level", for these associations are
not only systems of states within a larger system of states but units
made up of other units. Confronted with associations that are both
units and systems (and which, being both, are not exactly either
one), we are like Pufendorf puzzling over the irregular constructions
of Central Europe, wondering how a unum could be made out of such a
pluribus. Neither "anarchy" on the one side nor "empire" on the
other--the one with its image of hostility and unconditional rivalry,
the other with its connotations of rule and dominance--expresses the
character and logic of these associations. Nevertheless, one of the
ways in which these two federative systems are alike is that
throughout their respective histories they were described in both
ways--by some as an overbearing imperium that exercised despotic sway
over the political space in which it operated, and by others as an
empty shell ever tending toward dissolution and collapse.

Not a Departure, A Return

There is no theme more common in writings on twentieth-century
American foreign policy than that of fundamental transformations. As
the conventional rendering has it, in the late 1940s and early 1950s
a nation that for over a century took counsel from Washington's
warnings against foreign alliances contracted an enduring case of
pactomania. A nation once insular and isolationist became
cosmopolitan and interventionist. A nation that once enjoyed a
condition of "free security", surrounded by its oceanic moats and
protected by the British navy, became highly conscious of--even
obsessed by--mortal threats to its security. And a nation that once
made a fetish of unilateral methods suddenly saw itself as the leader
of multilateral coalitions and partnerships.

Most observers have looked approvingly on these "radical changes",
insisting that they were a necessary adjustment to new circumstances;
some have bemoaned them as entailing the passage from republic to
empire. But either way, the fact of radical discontinuity is seldom
questioned. Questioned it should be, however, for the characteristic
ideas of twentieth-century American internationalism may more
persuasively be seen as a return to, rather than a departure from,
historic traditions--a sort of grand unfolding, in different
circumstances and on a larger geographical scale, of aspirations that
were central to the American experiment from 1776 onwards.

The first assumption that must be cast aside is the idea that
eighteenth and nineteenth-century Americans had no experience of the
security dilemmas that were second nature to Europeans after the
emergence in the 1500s and 1600s of the modern state system. "The
anguishing dilemmas of security that tormented European nations",
writes Henry Kissinger, summarizing this widely held view, "did not
touch America for nearly 150 years." The truth is otherwise: Both of
the central elements in the early American credo--the "union" and
"independence" of Washington's Farewell Address--responded directly
to those anguishing dilemmas.

Given the ambitions of Britain, France, and Spain in North America,
the desire to remain separate and distinct from the European system
of alliances was just that--a desire and not an accomplished fact for
at least half a century after 1776. But the view expressed by
Kissinger is misleading for an even more basic reason. The great
American fear from 1776 to 1861 was not so much that America would
become ruinously entangled in the European system as that European
precedents and practices would take firm root within America--that
America, in other words, would become the European system. The desire
of America's early leaders to escape that fate was the most important
factor in the American Founding.

Essay Types: Essay