Beyond Domestic and International: The Imperial Roots of the US FP Establishment

• In Event: New Directions in International Relations and American Political Development

Abstract

This paper argues that the foundations of the U.S. foreign policy establishment emerged from a global imperial experience, and not primarily from a ‘domestic’ liberal tradition. While much IR literature on U.S. hegemony begins with postwar U.S. hegemony, this paper asks how U.S. experiments in overseas empire shaped plans for a liberal international economic order after World War II. To answer this question, I examine the formation of the U.S. state’s liberal international ordering project from the birth of U.S. empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific to the establishment of the United Nations. I analyze the archival records of a set of American policy entrepreneurs and examine how their ideas about empire and global order brought them deep into the corridors of power. Traveling between metropole and periphery, these practitioner- theorists brought their solutions to imperial problems home, turning them into foundational U.S. policies. While the paper acknowledges the salience of the U.S. tradition of liberal (or republican) internationalism, and of domestic forces in shaping foreign policy, I demonstrate how U.S. foreign policy officials derived their views and strategies from a comparative study of imperial administration as much as from domestic republican ideals. The paper also demonstrates that domestic reform in the interest of global competitiveness, rather than being a novel feature of U.S. policy, has roots going back at least to the turn of the twentieth century. This fact, I suggest, carries lessons for the contemporary moment, as U.S. policy makers seek out ways of reasserting primacy in an increasingly multipolar world. The paper contributes to the IR literature on liberal internationalism, and re-centers the question of American empire in debates on the nature and sources of the U.S.-led liberal international order.

Author

• David Kenneth Johnson, London School of Economics