WASHINGTON, July 4 (UPI) -- On the Fourth of July, we Americans tend to mislead ourselves as to what America is about. We glorify separation -- separation from England, from Europe, from Central Government in general -- as if it were the source of our freedom.
It isn't. We pay a high price for it.
The habit of treating Independence as the basis of American liberty is a natural mistake, but a mistake nonetheless, and one that does America real harm. The actual historical basis of American liberty lies in the English political skills that settlers brought here. America's political heritage consists of a long cumulative series of constitutional achievements: the Magna Carta, the formation of an English parliament, the growth of English parliamentary power and representative government, the American colonial assemblies beginning in Jamestown in 1619, the Glorious Revolution and English Constitutional Settlement of the 1690s, the Anglo-Scottish parliamentary Union of 1707, the election of governors in America after 1776, the Articles of Confederation, the Federal Constitution of 1787.
By equating our freedom with separation, we inadvertently give moral support to isolationism and anti-governmentalism. This has at times put dangerous obstacles in the way of our capabilities for running a government and a foreign policy sufficiently effective to protect our vital interests. It has led to denial and denunciation of our European roots and in favor of an exaggerated multiculturalism. It has given rhetorical cover to revolutionaries and independence-seekers everywhere, good or bad (most of them bad). It has damaged America's ability to understand what is really good and great in herself.
The Founding Fathers of America themselves thought of the Constitution as their proudest achievement, not Independence. They came to Independence with reluctance, as a regrettable necessity, not an inherent virtue. The reason for Independence was not that it was the same thing as freedom, but that the British, faced with the problem of getting America to pay its share of the burdens of the Seven Years' War, had tried to cut the Gordian knot by taxing Americans directly, instead of taking up the more complicated proposals, such as those of Franklin, for reforming the empire along federal lines. For the Founders, Independence was a means, not an end in itself; the end was human freedom and progress.
Later generations fell into the natural trap of making a virtue of necessity, equating freedom with independence as if they were the same thing. This helped solidify a separate national identity for a time, but it was a false equation and has been the source of America's most damaging mistakes: the secessions of slave states in 1860 in the name of "freedom;" the Anglophobia and isolationism; the sitting out of the Allied cause in 1914 and 1939 until it was nearly too late and the cause of freedom was nearly lost altogether. Today it serves to undermine the deeper fonts of American identity, which go back centuries before 1776.
What inspired and made feasible America's greatest successes at home and abroad -- the deepening of the Union in 1787 with a new Federal Constitution, the subsequent widening of the Union from 13 to 50 states without any loss of depth, and after 1945, the American initiatives that led to the Marshall Plan, the European Union, the United Nations, and NATO -- was not Independence at all, it was representative government and Federalism.
The American Federalist movement that emerged in the 1780s was one that based itself on centuries of cumulative progress in constructing representative institutions, from the Magna Carta to the parliamentary union of England with Scotland a mere 80 years earlier. Standing on this foundation, it saw new vistas opening up for even vaster union-in-freedom, by constructing a continent-wide federal representative government. Thus the Constitution of 1787. America owes its good fortune, not to its separation, but to the boldness of vision of its federalists in uniting free people.
After the Union proved itself in fire and re-consolidated with surprising ease after 1865, new federalist movements emerged in America and Britain, perceiving even greater vistas coming into view for English-speaking union, for European and trans-Atlantic federalism, and eventually for uniting the whole world. These were the neo-Hamiltonians of the late 1800s, the Progressive Republicans of Theodore Roosevelt, the Federal Unionists of the 1930s. It was they who laid the groundwork for the Anglo-American rapprochement in the 1890s and for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the United Nations and even the European Union.
It was not the American Founders who deified Independence, or who stood by old forms of government and old borders like sacred cows. Rather, they saw these as means to human ends, and changed them dramatically to make use of new means they envisaged as becoming available. They established "new government", new arrangements for people to use their freedom and get together in joint representative bodies, so as to serve the expanding needs of an expanding people for "freedom and happiness." That was the goal of Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the 1776 Declaration; he justified independence as a means to it, not an end in itself, and rather decried it as a tragic necessity. Some 13 years later, with the Constitution, the goal was realized in a form sufficient for its generation and the coming century. Today it challenges us to return to the same spirit and see what is needed to realize the goal in our day and age, with the vastly expanded needs and opportunities that free people face.
Wars for independence have been frequent since 1776, but most of them have resulted in governments worse than the old ones. What was special in America was not that it separated, but that it built a deeper Union than before and invented a new efficient form of federalism with the Constitution. This is what enabled democracy to work so well in America. It reversed the 2,000-year-old assumption that democracy could function only in a small turbulent city-state. It turned democracy from a term of abuse into the political ideal of the world. It was an organic part of the constitutional growth of the English-speaking world: building on the recent example of the Anglo-Scottish Union, it laid the grounds in turn for the federations of Canada and Australia, for the rapprochement of the English-speaking peoples, and for the formation around them of the far-flung alliance structures of NATO, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Group of Eight major industrialized nations.
Freedom-in-Union has been the grand formula for America's success and for the gradual triumph of freedom in all the Western world; Freedom-in-Separation has been the formula at its best for rearguard defensive actions, but otherwise for tragic mistakes. As the world grows smaller, we need more of the spirit of Freedom-in-Union. This is the spirit that is worth recalling to ourselves on the Fourth of July.
-- Ira Straus teaches international relations at the University of Tuebingen and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
