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.

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.

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.

There are, indeed, crucial institutional differences between the
constitutional partnership of free nations established after the
Second World War and the union of different republics established in
1787. Of these differences, the most obvious is that the Constitution
provided a common government for the members of the Union, whereas
the post-World War II system rested on an institutional base that is
best described as "