Ironically, however, the founders were not entirely successful in
making that escape. For several generations after 1789, the country
was haunted by an imagined sequence of events that would lead from
disunion and secession to inter-sectional rivalry, war, and
despotism. Though all Americans wished to escape this downward
spiral, their public debates and private letters were filled with
warnings that they were just a step away from falling into it. The
whole dynamic of American politics from 1789 to 1861 lay in the
occurence, about every ten years, of a monumental sectional crisis
that would be averted only through an unexpected turn of events or an
inspired act of statesmanship. Because disunion was widely understood
to be a virtual synonym for war, the threat of force was not banished
from the system. The beast still sat there, with a grin on its face,
insinuating itself into the rivalries of the sections. Far from being
indifferent to the security problems that have drawn the anxious
attention of internationalists in the twentieth century, Americans
were obsessed by them from the critical period just before the making
of the Constitution until the Civil War. They did not enjoy the
alternative of withdrawing from "the state system" because they were
squarely in the middle of one.

The true American security problem, then, lay not so much in the
ambition of foreign powers as in the rivalries among the sections
themselves, as different in their interests and character, noted
Pierce Butler in 1787, as Russia and Turkey. A wide range of
observers in both America and Europe believed that the "natural"
course of events would entail the splintering of the Union and the
emergence of a system of regional confederacies, and it was the
deeply rooted character of this belief that explains why the making
of the Constitution and the perpetuation of the Union was so often
regarded as a miracle. Under these circumstances, security was
anything but free.

The more perfect union that established the conditions for American
security was not the product of nature but of art. It had a fragile,
artificial, and experimental character--features strikingly conveyed
by Rufus Choate, a nationalist and a Whig, in 1850:

"While our State governments must exist almost of necessity, and with
no effort from within or without, the UNION of the States is a
totally different creation--more delicate, more artificial, more
recent, far more truly a mere production of the reason and the
will--standing in far more need of an ever-surrounding care, to
preserve and repair it."

Whereas the states were "natural" and were "a single and uncompounded
substance", the Union was "an artificial aggregation of such
particles", "a community miscellaneous and widely scattered", "a
system of bodies advancing slowly through a resisting medium."

The American-led multilateral alliance system after World War II may
be fairly described in similar terms; observers were acutely
conscious of its fragility, and of its need for "an ever-surrounding
care, to preserve and repair it." Indeed, if the dynamics of early
American history cannot be understood without reference to the fear
of a raging state system emerging in the New World, it is equally the
case that twentieth-century American internationalism cannot be fully
understood without seeing it against the background of the earlier
American experience with federal union. A wide range of assumptions,
fears, and hopes that were characteristic of American reflection on
their federal union entered again into the thinking of Americans when
they considered the purposes of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth
century. Often unconsciously, we have been duplicating the thought
experiments of our forebears, seeking a set of relationships with
friends and allies that would do for regional or world order in the
twentieth century what federal union did for the American states and
sections in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

When Americans came to the realization in the twentieth century that
North America could no longer be a world unto itself, they searched
for associations and partners that would "domesticate" or
"constitutionalize" the anarchy of the state system. That search has
entailed great variety in the associations envisaged: the community
of English-speaking peoples, a universal association for collective
security, a Western hemisphere community, an Atlantic Community, a
Great Power concert, a federal state binding the Atlantic democracies
or the world, the United Nations--all had their successive advocates
before 1945. There was, however, something dream-like and
insubstantial about most of these visions. While sometimes inspiring,
they usually ran aground on the rocks of experience. Just as it took
Americans over three decades in the years before 1787 to find a
suitable middle way between the competing specters of anarchy and
despotism, it took a comparable length of time--from, roughly, 1914
to 1949--to discover the lineaments of that resolution in the
twentieth century. The security and economic system whose golden
anniversary we are now commemorating was the product of that
discovery, though at the moment of creation in the late 1940s no one
could be certain which elements in the makeshift response would prove
enduring.

In a celebrated phrase, Frederick Jackson Turner once called the
United States "a federation of sections" and a "union of potential
nations." The significance of the section in American history, Turner
persuasively observed, "is that it is the faint image of a European
nation and that we need to reexamine our history in the light of this
fact." I will be suggesting in this essay that the significance of
the post-World War II multilateral alliance system is that it is the
faint image of the American union, and that we need to re-examine our
diplomatic traditions and contemporary purposes in the light of that
fact.

The Federal Principle and American Internationalism

That there should exist these similarities should not appear too
surprising, once it is understood that the fundamental problem to
which both early American constitutionalism and twentieth-century
internationalism were responding was substantially the same: How to
avoid the perils of--how, hence, to reform the bases of--the
Westphalian system. The basic questions, inevitably, were very
similar: Will democracies maintain peaceful relations, or are they
subject to the same predatory impulses and systemic pressures that
lead other states to war? Will ties associated with commerce promote
pacific relations among states, or will such entanglements lead to
increased friction and promote conflict? Can two distinct conceptions
of liberty--that of individual human rights and of the "liberty of
states"--be reconciled when they conflict? Can republican states
successfully cooperate in the absence of a common government?

The similarity in the political speculation of these two otherwise
very different ages also suggests why it is mistaken to view early
American statecraft as wholly or even primarily "unilateralist", as
is invariably affirmed in the standard histories of American
diplomacy. It is certainly true that Americans were determined to
avoid entangling alliances with European states. The principal reason
for this determination, however, was that they had made the most
entangling of alliances among themselves, and they well understood
that involvement in the European system might launch them on a path
that would lead to the dissolution of the Union.

To make that Union work, Americans articulated a great many of the
ideas that have informed the theory and practice of international
cooperation since World War II (which have gone under the largely
synonymous terms of multilateralism and internationalism). Traits
common to both systems include: 1) the peculiar importance attached
to "good faith" or credibility; 2) the affirmation of the norms of
codetermination and concurrent majority; 3) the acceptance of the
need for "reciprocal concession" and "diffuse reciprocity"; 4) the
belief that "all for one and one for all" must be the basis of their
security doctrine, because of the conviction that if they did not
hang together they would be doomed to hang separately; 5) the
emphasis placed on what Madison called "the vital principle" of the
equality of states; and 6) the insight that the reduction or
elimination of trade barriers within the union would provide a firm
basis for the prosperity of all its members.

To insist on the family resemblance between the ideas articulated in
these two epochs--and hence to draw a parallel between early American
federalism and twentieth-century American
internationalism--admittedly takes us onto hazardous linguistic
terrain, for each of these terms (like all the other "isms" in the
political vocabulary) have borne a wide variety of meanings. It is
not unusual--indeed, it is altogether characteristic--for political
concepts to undergo an astonishing revolution in signification, in
which they come to mean precisely the opposite of what they once did.
This has happened, of course, to "liberalism" and "conservatism." It
has also occurred to federal union and its various cognates
(federation, federalism, federative system). If this comparison is to
be sustained it needs to be borne in mind that what the statesmen of
the late eighteenth century understood "federal" to mean is very
different from the understandings prevailing today. The consolidation
and centralization that have taken place in all federal states,
together with the formalization of the concept by scholars (who now
distinguish it sharply from a confederal arrangement), take us into a
conceptual universe different from that which the framers inhabited.

Essay Types: Essay