The United States and Its Foreign Policy: Searching for the Lost Federalism

Michele Ballerin
Former Vice-Secretary of UEF-Italy

There’s a feature in the USA cultural life which has always amazed me, particularly in the way Americans perceive themselves and their own history: they are considerably proud of the first chapter of their adventure – the independence war against Great Britain –, while they pay a far weaker enthusiasm to the second – the Philadelphia Convention and the birth of the first federation in history, in 1787.

Having conquered their independence by defeating the strongest army of that time with a scratch militia is one of the decisive elements which have contributed to found their common identity, and it’s definitely not hard to understand the reason. Far paler is the representation that Americans have about themselves as the inventors of federalism. And that is what sounds weird.

Despite the American constitution has been taken as a model for a remarkable number of successive experiences, first in Latin America and Europe and then anywhere in the world, the value – quite universal – of the paradigm that it establishes seems to escape the US citizens, its trait as the best formula for what is, on balance, the most serious issue humanity has to deal with today: the cohabitation of seven billion people on a planet which is getting smaller and smaller (also known as “globalization”). I don’t remember exactly when I was touched by this paradoxical thought for the first time: the inventors of federalism are not aware of the gift they’ve given to the world; they probably have never read Kant’s Perpetual peace, or it hasn’t awakened in them the slightest interest.

It might be simply the umpteenth excess of pragmatism in a people not loving to indulge in abstractions. But it is not all. Indeed, some macroscopic consequences originate from that, and nobody, among those above-mentioned seven billions, can escape: I’m referring to the American foreign policy.

There was no need of the Trump administration to realize that American foreign policy is without a compass, and, since many decades now, it has been proceeding gropingly in the darkness, like a truck with no brakes in a thick mist. The result of such a confusion is discouraging and it’s under everybody’s eyes. It’s the show of the US pendulum incessantly oscillating between two options which are, at the same time, extreme and equally impossible: the claim to oversee the world order and that to opt out from it. Hegemony and isolationism are the two opposite utopias between which the American foreign policy makes a perpetual, inconclusive and sometimes ruinous coming and going, and the result is glaring: the United States hasn’t found yet its role in the world, its specific vocation and, consequently, its mission. Briefly, it doesn’t know yet what it is going to do as an adult.

Still, a third alternative does exist, and it is the Philadelphia experience itself to suggest it. The United States was born to teach the other nations on earth the technique of political integration among sovereign states, and, by that, of a durable peace among peoples. But it’s not enough. The invention of federalism is just half the work: the other half consists in applying it wherever is needed. The task the United States is called to accomplish is the construction, reinforcement and democratization of supranational institutions.

The topic is clear enough, and we can believe that when Americans will admit it they will also regain their proverbial ability to get enthusiastic, and the self-confidence they can’t think themselves without. Their foreign policy will be put on two solid tracks and every American between New York and San Francisco will know why his flag is waving. It will be their big chance to get back being a beacon and a guide – as well as the a posteriori justification for so much Hollywood-dispensed rhetoric.

Since this option is the only rational one among the possible three, we should resist any temptation to consider it as utopian: sooner or later the United States will be forced to embrace it, because there is nothing else it can do, given that it can’t rule the world and, on the other hand, it can’t even step down.

But what would such a policy concretely mean? There are several directions in which this recovered goodwill could be canalized.

Just to start, the US foreign policy should abandon every reservation with regard to the European integration process. The attitude of the United States towards this phenomenon has always been ambivalent: favourable at the beginning, when there was to accompany the European continent in the phase of its post-war reconstruction and give to unification, with the Marshall Plan, the first powerful boost; seesawing in the following decades, when on the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean Europe was perceived, in turn, like a necessary partner, a useful vassal or an insidious competitor.

This ambivalence has been clearly embodied in the growing antagonism between the dollar and the euro, with the first feeling threatened in its role of international currency by the strength and the prestige of the second. Here again we can’t see a wiser solution than a reform of the world monetary order, with a view to establish a reserve currency disjointed from the sovereignty of any nation, like Robert Triffin taught in the sixties relaunching Keynes’ unheeded suggestion. And that would be another precise direction to move on, another cardinal point that the US foreign policy could assign to itself.

Today, Americans should have no more doubts that a strong and united Europe is the indispensable complement to any influence they aspire to exercise. And the same attitude is required towards every other attempt of political and economic integration in the world, be it in South America, Africa or Asia. All these processes should be stimulated and favoured.

Beside and above that, obviously, stands the United Nations, as the hub of any desirable balance in a stable and peaceful world, to which the creative energies of whoever dreams, for the future of humanity, peace and wellness, instead of war and misery, should be directed. There is no need to repeat here the list of reforms that should be worked on: the federalists have been doing it for decades, and the World Federalist Movement also exists to remind it. The road to go, as gradual as we want but clear, is the same that the Americans discovered in Philadelphia and that the Europeans have been trying to follow since 1950: the transfer of sovereignty from the national to the supranational dimension.

We can’t deny that it’s a grand scenario, although still hypothetical. Only one actor is still required: the American intellectuals. What are they busy with, what are they intent on, the protagonists of the American culture? Which issue is being debated in the United States? It is a kind of mistery for us Europeans.

Some precedents do exist in the stars-and-stripes historiography: among these, the Spencerian John Fiske with his American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History and Benjamin Franklin Trueblood, translator of Kant and author of The Federation of the World. But we are talking about the 19th century. What about today?

I think that federalists should address a frank plea to the American intelligentsia, so that it starts a reflection about the only issue which is truly capital to it: the role of the United States in the 21st century. Going back to the source of national history, restarting from Philadelphia with the eye turned beyond their own borders, combining their original idealism with the only realism that is possible at present – world federalism: it seems to me that there are the conditions to start in the United States a new, great cultural season, which could culminate – with some luck – in the birth of an opinion movement able to influence the government. For the American nation it would be the definitive passage from adolescence to maturity: the true discovery of itself. Isn’t the United States itself the country where the presence of a vast, influential federalist movement is required? This is the question, closed in a bottle, that we want to throw into the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

I’m conscious that this message can sound a little too paradoxical in the time of Trump and Kim Jong Un, when the geopolitical balances seem to depend on who has got the bigger button… But, as we said, there’s a limit to the will of nations, and it’s the one which is imposed, ultimately, by their own interests in the medium and long run. No one wants to be in the shoes of the captain who steers the Titanic straight against the iceberg. No one wants to live in a world where any dictator, raìs or gang leader keeps his own nuclear weapon in his pocket, or in a world where climate keeps deteriorating until the point of no return. Ergo, the moment will come when the United States will have to take the responsibility upon itself. The good news is that, by then, there will be a user’s handbook (the federalist thought), a specific project to be concretely realized (the world federation) and a reliable partner to do it with (the European Union) awaiting.