At the heart of the federal principle, as traditionally conceived,
lies the idea of a covenant or foedus (the etymological root of
federal). As Rufus Davis has suggested, the covenant, together with
the "synonymous ideas of promise, commitment, undertaking, or
obligating, vowing and plighting one's word", implies two other
things besides keeping faith: "it involves the idea of cooperation,
reciprocity, mutuality"; and it "betokens the need for some measure
of predictability, expectation, constancy, and reliability in human
relations." These three concepts--commitment, reciprocity,
predictability--are closely associated with contemporary ideas of
international cooperation, and they were endlessly elaborated in
debates over the nature and character of federal union from 1787 to
1861. Yet no one would think of ascribing primacy to these values in
characterizing the relationship that now exists in our system between
the national government and the states. So, too, the sense in which
the Constitution might be described as federal in its
foundations--that is, as a compact among the people of the
states--has been altogether lost, and it would be far more accurate,
despite a few recent Supreme Court protestations to the contrary, to
describe the United States today as a unitary state organized on the
principle of devolution, with the states enjoying no more autonomy
than the national government thinks it expedient to bestow upon them.
The cumulative result of the Civil War, the New Deal, and the Great
Society has worked a revolution in our constitutional structure.
Though there is still a division of powers between the general
government and the states that may institutionally be described as a
variant of "federalism", the federal values that once informed this
institutional structure have been virtually obliterated in our
polity. But those values have not disappeared. On the contrary, they
have migrated to and now inform our key relationships within the
democratic alliance.

The attraction of the federal principle is that it promises a way of
simultaneously reaffirming both individuality and commonality in the
relationship among political groups. For this reason it may be
thought of as "an exercise in the difficult art of separation", as
proposing devices "to cope with the problem of how distinct
communities can live a common life together without ceasing to be
distinct communities", as a "coming together to stay apart." Such
ideas were basic to early American federalism. It was, for example,
one of the central arguments of those who advocated the ratification
of the Constitution that the rights and separate identities of the
states would be far more secure under the proposed system than under
any other practicable alternative. American internationalists have
often appealed to the same basic proposition, holding that the
national interest as well as the ideals that define us as a people
could only be advanced within a framework that ensured security and
prosperity to all peoples within the family of democratic nations.

The Partition of Cares

The similarities between the federal principle and the
internationalist idea entitle us to say that they are not two
separate traditions of thought but are rather distinct though
intermingled currents within the same tradition. They each play
variations on the idea that there exists a kind of ascending or
descending scale of human needs, communities, identities, and
loyalties for which appropriate institutional expression must be
found. There is a passage in Jefferson that well illustrates the
character of this task. Writing at a time when his distrust of
centralization had risen again to a high pitch, Jefferson held that

It is not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but by
their distribution, that good government is effected. Were not this
great country already divided into States, that division must be
made, that each might do for itself what concerns itself directly,
and what it can so much better do than a distant authority. Every
State is again divided into counties, each to take care of what lies
within its local bounds; each county again into townships or wards,
to manage minuter details; and every ward into farms, to be governed
each by its individual proprietor.

Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we
should soon want bread. It is by this partition of cares, descending
in gradation from general to particular, that the mass of human
affairs may be best managed, for the good and prosperity of all.

In this perfect explication of what has become familiar as the principle of "subsidiarity", Jefferson was writing as an individualist, a localist,
a federalist, and a sectionalist; his intent was to deny to the
general government powers that went a scintilla beyond those granted
by the constitutional compact. But he was also, in his own
estimation, writing as a nationalist; it was his firm conviction that
the union could only survive if the powers of the general government
were sharply circumscribed--that the clock would break if the spring
were wound too tightly. Jefferson's great adversary, Alexander
Hamilton, had the opposite fear--that of dissolution. He was
pessimistic that the Constitution of 1787 would be sufficiently
strong to countervail the deeper and more natural loyalties to
locality, state, and section that would exist under the projected
system.

The history of federal union involved the continual interplay between
Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian proclivities. America invariably found
herself torn between centripetal and centrifugal forces. The great
American historians of the nineteenth century--George Bancroft,
Francis Parkman, Henry Adams--all recurred to this story line,
finding in American history "an intensely dramatic journey along a
narrow path of moderation" between anarchy and despotism, or complete
decentralization and total centralization.

A very similar tension has characterized the history of the
post-World War II American system. The fear, so often expressed over
the last fifty years, that the alliance would splinter is very
Hamiltonian, as are the programs and institutions that were seen as
crucial in arresting the centrifugal forces inherent in
confederacies: the grand financial settlement of the late 1940s and
early 1950s, the standing military forces effectively integrated with
those of other nations, the commercial interdependence encouraged
with Europe and Japan, and the reliance on the power and discretion
of the American executive. But the Jeffersonian idea of an "empire of
liberty" also informed the institutions and practices of the
post-World War II system. That republics might voluntarily cooperate
with one another in pursuit of common objectives, that such a union
might be held together through sentiment rather than the sword, that
the federating republics might jointly resolve to respect common
principles like the equality of states, and hold steadfast to a
common veneration of free government--all these ideas are distinctly
Jeffersonian. In both epochs, these primordial American concerns were
in fundamental tension, yet each was necessary and vital to balance
the other.

As Jefferson's remarks attest, the problem of matching institutions
to communities involves more than simply reconciling general
interests and particular identities, in the way envisaged by the
dualistic frameworks of internationalism and federalism. Recognition
must also be accorded to a range of other values, including those
embodied in individual freedom and in the dense loyalties and "little
platoons" of civil society. The Founders, in keeping with the
enlightened political speculation of their age, understood that their
problem was to create the political and legal framework that would
best correspond with this ascending scale of human needs and
loyalties. It is our problem today. The return to mixed loyalties and
identities that is a distinguishing feature of the contemporary
period makes the political thought of their pre-nationalist age
strikingly relevant to our post-nationalist era, much more so than
the political thought of the intervening age of hypernationalism from
the 1860s to the 1940s. The kind of nationalism to which we are
called by writers like Michael Lind, who is hostile to both
federalism and internationalism, is a wholly inadequate response to
the task of finding the appropriate partition of cares: the
nationalist sun that such writers worship extinguishes the light from
all the other stars in the sky.

To grasp the essentials of this task is not to resolve it; its
character is one of surpassing complexity. There is, however,
considerable evidence that the existing partition of cares is
seriously disordered. Daniel Bell's prescient observation that "the
national state has become too small for the big problems in life, and
too big for the small problems" nicely summarizes the heart of the
difficulty: that, on the one hand, the national government--indeed,
government generally--has taken on so many different functions and
penetrated so many areas of life that it often appears as an alien
and unresponsive Leviathan; and, on the other, that there exists a
range of problems in security, commerce, finance, and the
environment--the same areas of jurisdiction, with the exception of
the last, granted to the federal government in 1787--that the
American government cannot satisfactorily address without the
effective cooperation of other nation-states.

Structural Crisis

The various theses advanced here invite us to reconsider in basic
ways the historic evolution of American statecraft. If the American
confrontation with the Westphalian system is not a late arriving
phenomenon of the twentieth century but central to the American
experiment from the beginning; if security was never "free" but was
dearly purchased by a Constitution that was "no more than a
profoundly wise agreement to differ"; and if the ideas commonly
associated with twentieth-century multilateralism and
internationalism are closely akin to the norms and purposes promoted
by federal union--then the way is clear for redrawing the historic
map of American statecraft. In this revised picture, internationalism
appears not so much as a departure from historic traditions as a
resumption of them, though with a different set of institutions and
on a wider geographical scale.

Essay Types: Essay