Building the Atlantic World

In 1963 a group of scholars at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania, (where I was a student), published a book on political unification, Building the Atlantic World. The principal authors, Robert Strausz-Hupe, William R. Kintner, James E. Dougherty, enlisted a host of other specialists in attempting to “reinvigorate” the idea of a regional democratic political union of Atlantic states.

Already in place was NATO, a military alliance between them begun in 1949, but the other regional units were strictly European. The establishment of the European Union in 1992 strengthened the ties between the “old” and “new” worlds, to be sure, but failed to satisfy any formal political unification between the two sides of the ocean. The notion of an “Atlantic” union was hardly new in 1963 and still remains an unfulfilled ambition, despite its history and the attraction of the idea. From the beginning, the authors of Building the Atlantic World, in the middle of the Cold War, stated their “purpose” for American foreign policy within that context. While the Cold War has long-since been over, the purpose remains to this day. As they wrote from the start,

“The overarching problem confronting the United States in the second half of the twentieth century is the creation of a more stable international order. If the United States is to master this task … it must enlist the support of like-minded peoples. Since the peoples of the West are joined by kindred values and institutions, the United States turns logically to them as partners in the great undertaking. … It is the thesis of this study that the peoples of the West, if they are to assure their own future, as well as to continue to foster the development of new societies in Asia and Africa, must achieve a greater measure of Atlantic unity.”

There is no formal “dateline” for purpose. If the above quote “second half of the twentieth century” was transposed to “first half of the twenty-first century” the point would lose none of its validity. Like the word “unification” itself the term Atlantic Union reflects a political/sociological unity going far back in history. As a “connecting theme,” the interaction between Western Europe and its colonies in the Americas embraces a wide perspective of demographic, social, economic, political, legal, military, intellectual and religious notions that encompass both sides of the ocean. Despite the incessant warfare between the two sides of the Atlantic, especially in the last century, their unity can be viewed from several perspectives. As the authors of Building the Atlantic World have emphasized, the concept is pluralistic from nearly all dimensions: “The pluralism and diversity which are perhaps the most important characteristics of Western civilization offered free scope to the creativity of peoples sharing similar basic values and thus provided ideal conditions for the cumulative enrichment of the political, economic, social and intellectual life of the entire North Atlantic area.” Such “conditions,” the authors continued, can be divided into three main “arteries” of life.

First, political. “Nowhere was the interaction between Europeans and Americans more apparent than in the development of political institutions on both continents.” They then remind us of the powerful European connection (including English) to the American Revolution and Constitution from the Enlightenment and the writings of John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Rousseau and how their contributions inspired and shaped the American political character. Mention is also made of the Scottish philosopher, James Bryce, that “America has in some respects anticipated European nations. She is walking before them along a path which they may probably follow” (1888). Inside this category was the influx of peoples across the ocean: “In succeeding waves, they came first from Northern and Western Europe and then from Europe’s Southern and Eastern reaches to work in American factories, farms and mines. They provided the manpower and skills without which the United States could not have risen to its pre-eminent world position in the twentieth century.” (Building the Atlantic World)

Second, “which molded North Atlantic civilization is derived from the Roman tradition … the insistence upon the rule and imperial majesty of law, a rational and applicable law, before which all men are equal. Western legal thought rests upon Roman foundations. Yet it is enlivened by an un-Roman concern with the legal protection of individual liberty against governmental authority … and with the vigilant defense against possible abuses of power and authority.”

Third, hierarchy of values inherited from the “old” world was “respect for individual freedom based upon a latitude of tolerance, of freedom of conscience and of thought unprecedented in the history of mankind. Descartes, Milton and Locke proclaimed in their writings the right of man to think for himself. … The right to diversity, in turn, was codified in a body of laws protecting the freedom of thought, press and assembly, and safeguarding the individual citizen from arbitrary arrest.” (ibid.) Within these parameters many have declared for Western unity, especially inside the North Atlantic but, in today’s world, certainly not confined to that region. The essential point is still shared values, from all perspectives, which certainly encompasses more than a single area. But it all began there and, logically, that’s where it should begin now. While there have been many “calls” for unification on an Atlantic basis, from Clarence Street (Union Now, 1939) to Churchill, Roosevelt to Truman, none perhaps can match the great French historian, Jules Michelet, who uttered these famous words after the French defeat against Prussia, 1871:

“I call here to a European Congress … the English, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Swiss, I call the Germans. I call here the two worlds. I solemnly call the young America. Let her justify our hope, let her be deaf to all the petty interests, free of all petty rancor, devoted to the general interest of all human progress, closely associated with the civilized West, with the cause of liberty which she has supported so recently and which she has made so gloriously victorious.” - Jules Michelet

Two years later another French historian, Henri Martin, called for essentially the same, in a message ironically familiar to us all here in 2024: “Russia,” Martin declared, “rests on a community personified in one man who can arbitrarily dispose of all liberties, all property and all families.” A disunited Europe, Martin feared, would be eventually overwhelmed by Russia, leaving a continent tragically similar to the one we have just escaped. “America,” he felt would be,
“alone to preserve all the higher elements of human civilization … then there would be only two powers left on earth which will divide it up as between the light and the darkness. All moral life will then take its refuge in the other [Western] hemisphere.”

Many others, scholars, clerics, politicians, businessman, etc. have taken the “call,” from John Hay (Lincoln’s confidante and later Secretary of State), to Alexis de Tocqueville, Henry Adams, Lord Bryce, Admiral Mahan, Thorstein Veblen, Sir Norman Angell have all called for Atlantic Union. Writing in 1917, as the First World War dragged on, the famous British Quaker, Norman Angell, proclaimed an idea that may have save humanity the tragedies of that remaining century:
“The survival of the Western democracies … depends upon their capacity to use it [the war] as a unity, during the war and after … we have refused to recognize its necessary conditions, a kind and degree of democratic internationalism to which current political ideas and feelings are hostile; an internationalism which is not necessary to the enemy, but is to us. He can in some measure ignore it. We cannot. His unity … is based upon the old nationalistic conceptions; our unity depends upon a revision of them, an enlargement into an internationalism.”

During the Second World War, Walter Lippmann, the first great American foreign policy journalist who was present in 1919 at the Versailles Conference, urged the United States to “consolidate the strategic and diplomatic connections already existing, of the Atlantic Community.” In his 1996 book, Democracy and American Foreign Policy, Robert Strausz-Hupe, Austrian émigré, Penn Professor, founder of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (1955), five-time US Ambassador (and my intellectual mentor) wrote these words in the last chapter of his last book:
“Consequently, the time has come for leveling with the country and the world, and to state, in language understandable to all, the purpose and requirements of American foreign policy. Now less than ever can American democracy tolerate a world half free and half unfree. To abdicate from this mission as the federating power of democracy would be not only a colossal strategic blunder but also a betrayal of the ideals that led American democracy from a remote corner of the globe to the heights of world power.” That, at long last, should be the American “purpose” in foreign policy. For generations, it has been advertised, utilized and praised in theory. But what about “practice”? Ancient proverb, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Amidst political division, social chaos and “endless wars” who will take hold of the “American dream”?

In a 2023 essay in the journal Foreign Affairs (September-October; https://shorturl.at/hoKP7 ), Richard Haass, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that American needs to create an “order” to the world as a purpose in life. But which one? Presently there are at least 350 global and regional organizations devoted to a variety of economic, political, cultural, health, military and other missions. In his essay Haass notes that “Better to pursue realistic partnerships of the like-minded, which can bring a degree of order to the world, including specific domains of limited order, if not quite world order.”

Mr. Haass concludes on an optimistic note (as I do): “It will ask a great deal of U.S. policymakers and diplomats at a time when the country they work for is deeply divided and easily distracted. What is certain is that the course of this decade and decades to come will depend on the quality of officials’ political skills at home and their statecraft abroad.” But where are the “politicians and diplomats.”? Perhaps we have too many of the former, too few of the latter.

Can a country that cannot control its own border fix the world?
Santayana’s famous comment on the lasting nature of history, “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it,” may not be fully accurate. History can change, but it needs “human” help. In 1900 the average life-span of an American male was approximately 47 years; by 2021 it rose to approximately 76. That’s called “change.”

American purpose in the world has changed from world order to domestic priority, a change evident since the end of the Cold War (just compare Kennedy’s Inaugural, 1961, to Clinton’s, 1993). Rather than “dead,” American purpose in foreign policy can be considered as “passed out.” People who “pass out” revive the next morning.
As Ronald Reagan (whose Administration’s I served in) used to announce, ”it’s morning in America.”

Time to “wake up”? Get a purpose. It’s never too late!