Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789–1941 (review)

[Erratum]

In Union, Nation, or Empire, Hendrickson insists that the United States is no ordinary country. Founded, in part, as a refuge from European wars and realpolitik, the American colonies came to represent a new kind of international order, a society of states that chose to bind themselves—voluntarily, peacefully, and durably—for common peace and prosperity. This union was not so much a new nation at the start as it was an international system in its own right, which eventually was to develop the characteristics of a coherent nation-state. As Hendrickson explained in his earlier book, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence, 2003), this grand experiment in federation was a bold historical departure. In time, as he explains in this sequel, American federalism profoundly conditioned U.S. interactions with the larger world and became the basis for a distinctive “unionist” approach to international relations.

Hendrickson acknowledges that American debates about international relations have been complex and convoluted. From the outset, leading voices have proclaimed that the pursuit of national advantage and the reach for imperial dominion—certainly not the quest for “union”—ought to be the lodestars of American diplomacy. According to Hendrickson, three distinct and paradigmatic systems of thought—the unionist, the nationalist, and the imperial—emerged in the late eighteenth century and have vied for the soul of foreign policy ever since.

For Hendrickson, the unionist paradigm constitutes the most original and, he implies, the most distinctly American contribution to international theory and practice. Inspired by their own novus ordo seclorum, American unionists promoted institutional solutions for the world. Herein does Hendrickson find the deep roots of Wilsonianism. The League of Nations, he contends, did not spring fully born from Woodrow Wilson’s head; it had been in gestation for more than a century. In this context, the proponents of federal solutions ran into a paradox that Hendrickson acknowledges but does not resolve. Insofar as unionists exalted American federation as a model for emulation, they raised the implicit specter of world government. After all, the domestic trend had always run in the direction of centralization and homogenization, especially since the Civil War. But not even the most ardent proponents of institutionalized international comity ever proclaimed world government as a goal. Accordingly, they elided the implications of their analogy, which is more or less what Hendrickson does in his analysis of their thought.

Nonetheless, by offering a broad and systematic explanation of how the “internal” structures of American government have shaped a century and a half of U.S. foreign relations, Hendrickson opens new vistas for diplomatic historians. Moreover, he offers a clear warning to scholars of international relations in other disciplines who might be prone to generalize about the behavior of states in the international arena. The distinctive patterns of American history, Hendrickson insists, have durably shaped American actions in the larger world.

To its credit, Union, Nation, or Empire is highly detailed and informed principally by primary sources. But its strengths do not make it an easy book to read. Although Hendrickson covers almost as much chronological terrain as George C. Herring does in From Colony to Super Power: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (New York, 2008), the book is not a synthesis of existing scholarship; it offers much original research and interpretation. To be sure, Hendrickson has made an important contribution—and not only to the historiography of U.S. foreign relations. By explaining how history and ideas have mediated American diplomatic concepts and choices, Hendrickson makes a powerful case for thinking historically about international relations.