Identity Or Interest in the Foreign Policy of the Early Republic?

Review of International Studies (2000), 26, 599–622 Copyright © British International Studies Association American neutral rights reappraised: identity or interest in the foreign policy of the early Republic? JAMES SOFKA1 Abstract. This article analyses the early American commitment to maintaining its neutral rights from several theoretical perspectives. Rejecting recent constructivist interpretations as unsubstantiated by the empirical evidence, it concludes that early American leaders largely mirrored traditional eighteenth century mercantilist practices to suit the interests of the United States. In particular, Jefferson’s ‘two-tiered’ approach to the international system was based on astringent calculations of power rather than prevailing notions of ‘republicanism’. This ideology, while manifest in partisan rhetoric, had little measurable impact on the conduct of early American neutral rights policy. By focusing on the relationship of theory and practice in this context, this article offers a case study of the role of norms and ideology in the shaping of foreign policy in a republican state. In an important and perceptive essay Mlada Bukovansky provides a long-needed theoretical appraisal of early American attempts to secure and promote its neutral rights. Building on a tradition that began with the pioneering work of Louis Sears, Bukovansky explains the nearly obsessive American preoccupation with its neutral status in light of its identity as a republican state and its need to assert legitimizing principles in the international system to distinguish itself from the European Powers. Her thesis that ‘early US interpretations of neutrality were grounded in more general conceptions of, and discourse about the nature of, American republicanism’ contains two powerful arguments that can be expressed as follows: first, that neutral rights policy after 1783 was ultimately dictated by norms, and second, that this policy was wholly distinct from European practice, given its uniquely American character. Constructivist theory and the early American period The essence of Bukovansky’s argument is the prevailing constructivist theory that ‘state identity shapes interests, which in turn shape policy over time’.2 Hence she concludes that the United States, because of its republican constitutional founda- 1 The author wishes to thank Robert J. Beck for his kind suggestions as well as Michael J. Smith, J.C.A. Stagg, Jeffrey Legro, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments. Work on this article was aided by a research fellowship from the International Center for Jefferson Studies and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. I gratefully acknowledge numerous comments and suggestions I received from Jefferson scholars at a presentation of this argument at Monticello in June 1998. 2 Mlada Bukovansky, ‘American Identity and Neutral Rights from Independence to the War of 1812’, International Organization, 51 (1997), p. 210. 599 600 James Sofka tions, expanded prevailing definitions of neutrality law ‘in a more liberal direction’ than was common in eighteenth century commercial doctrines.3 In brief, the constructivist premise seeks to tie the frequently bifurcated spheres of domestic and international politics together by arguing that a state’s normative and ideological culture will, in Audie Klotz’s phrase, ‘reconstitute’ its foreign policy behaviour: identity shapes the perception, and pursuit, of national interests, especially in democracies.4 Moreover, constructivists seek to predict outcomes based on this characterization: if domestic institutions follow pattern X, then foreign policy choices will likely fall within set parameters of Y. While the term ‘constructivism’ first surfaced less than a decade ago, the idea is hardly new: Thucydides employed similar logic to explain Spartan behaviour in his History of the Peloponnesian War, and Fritz Fischer’s claim of German warmongering in 1914 ultimately rested on his conclusion that the militaristic and belligerent character of the Kaiser’s government led it to pursue hegemonic ambitions. Immanuel Kant, perhaps the first modern constructivist theorist, argued in 1795 that if all states had republican constitutions, ‘perpetual peace’ would be ‘guaranteed’.5 Constructivism can have great explanatory power in specific cases: Audie Klotz’s work on the revisal of American South African policy in the 1980s is the most frequently cited example, but the model can also clearly apply to instances such as the foreign policy of Hitler’s Germany, where national interests were clearly defined in accordance with the ideological framework of the regime and led Germany to ‘reconstitute’ the older Bismarck-Stresemann tradition of stability in favour of annexationism. In these cases constructivism cuts the Gordian knot of the old Primat der Innen- or Aussenpolitik question by admirably creating a coherent and unified whole from two distinct parts. To be effective, however, constructivist theory must accomplish two objectives: first, it must accurately identify the norms and ideology characterizing or ‘identifying’ a particular state, and second, it must clearly demonstrate that this ideology caused a shift in the definition of national interests and foreign policy goals. The first task is usually more straightforward than the latter, as governments routinely invoke normative justifications for policy. However, the ideas-to-practice aspect of constructivist theory can be its downfall in other, often less conspicuous, cases. Revolutionary France provides a useful illustration of this phenomenon: its radical consolidation of power internally and its obsessive quest with asserting its unique identity in Europe appear to render it a nearly perfect example of constructivism; yet as two of the ablest students of the period, Jeremy Black and Tim Blanning, have noted, in foreign policy its aims of primacy in Western Europe, antagonism towards Britain and Austria, and an entente with Spain, remained faithful to the ancien regime. As Black notes in a cautionary phrase, ‘though revolutionary emotion altered much of the tone of French policy it had much less effect on its substance and thus the situation after 1792–3 was one of the pursuit by greatly expanded means of aims which were not essentially new’.6 3 Bukovansky, pp. 211, 217, 233. 4 Audie Klotz, ‘Norms Reconstituting Interests: Global Racial Equality and US Sanctions Against South Africa’, International Organization, 49 (1995), pp. 451–78. 5 Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 99–102. 6 T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman, 1986); Jeremy Black, British Foreign Policy in An Age of Revolutions, 1783–1793, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 542. American neutral rights reappraised 601 Similarly, as James Joll reminds us in his critique of Fischer, in 1914 domestic political ideologies were partly but not wholly responsible for the outbreak of war, as even in the case of Wilhelmine Germany the linkage between identity of the regime and its foreign policy behaviour remains indeterminate.7 Constructivism is a useful tool in a multicausal array of explanations for state behaviour, but when invoked in monocausal terms it can become seriously misleading, as the tremendous controversy over the Fischer thesis on the First World War, the impact of the French Revolution on Europe, or the more vexing case of the the motives of Soviet behaviour in the early Cold War—to cite but three examples—demonstrates. These illus- trations suggest that the greatest weakness of constructivism is a tendency to take ideological pronouncements or stated identities at face value and to fail to rigorously measure their claims against actual practice. Rich in international and domestic political complexity, the early American period throws both the pitfalls and promises of constructivism—and its arch-enemy structural realism, which all but ignores domestic politics—into sharp relief. Like Fischer with the July crisis of 1914, Bukovansky explicitly rejects competing interpretations and argues that American conceptions of national identity were ‘constitutive rather than instrumental and principled rather than purely material’ and hence informed a commitment to a ‘liberal’ neutral policy after 1783. Norms and ideology, therefore, ultimately decided foreign policy questions even if the identity-to-interest process did not follow a perfectly ‘linear’ progression.8 Implicit in this thesis is the assumption that early American foreign policy should be understood as a precursor to the modern age; that is, the experiment launched in 1783 marked a radical departure in international relations and hence provides a basis from which to estab- lish generalized ‘rules’ about the subsequent conduct of American foreign policy. This idea has certainly found its share of adherents in both the historical and social science fields, but it rests on a tenuous conceptual foundation.9 Applying late twentieth century conceptions of American identity, liberal internationalism, and international law to the political universe of the eighteenth century risks overgeneralization.10 More critically, if the causal link between identity and interest cannot be clearly defined, a constructivist reading of foreign policy simply cannot hold, and therefore 7 James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1992), ch. 5. R.K. Ramazani has used the same focus on the causal link between ideology and

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