#11
The Russia Journal
July 5-11, 2002
What does America's Revolution mean for Russians?
By IRA STRAUS / Special to The Russia Journal

Americans talk a lot about what other countries could learn from our successful democracy. In Russia, we get a reputation of being smug, and a bit hypocritical, about it.

Russians get the impression that America is preaching the opposite of the principles of its success. They wonder why the American media seem to want independence for Chechnya, though the United States would not tolerate it for one of their states or indigenous tribes, regardless of past sufferings. Or why Americans often preach decentralization for Russia, while practicing a highly centralized Union themselves.

They are right: Americans preach what they wouldn't practice, and their practice makes more sense than the preaching. Perhaps the American motto ought to be, "do as we do, not as we say."

The problem is not really one of hypocrisy. It is a sincere misconception by Americans about their own history and institutions.

There is a tremendous gulf between contemporary American discourse and the actual practice and institutions of their politics. Americans trace their freedom and democracy to July 4, the Pilgrims, independence from the Old World and destruction of central government.

In practice, the American institutions of freedom and representative government are outgrowths of centuries of development, most of it in the Old World -- the Magna Carta, the development of the English parliament and its transplantation across the Atlantic in the form of colonial assemblies, Roman law and Greek democracy.

The Fourth of July itself was secondary, as the colonial assemblies merely reformed state governments minus royal appointees. The greatest revolution was the creation of a federal government in the 1770s-80s, built on centuries of learning representative government.

All of this is mystified by the Fourth of July celebrations. Every year we tell ourselves that our freedom comes from independence.

The national patriotic mythology of America is similar to the national patriotic mythology of Russia. Both speak of uniqueness; both deny their country's European foundations. In America, the myth is that we escaped the corruption and oppression of Europe, that we are not European, but a unique multicultural civilization bridging all societies , and that what is good in America comes from separating from Europe.

In Russia, the parallel myth is that the country is Eurasian, not decadent-corrupt European, and its virtue is that of a unique civilization bridging the European and Asian worlds.

The reality is that both countries are primarily European in root. America's advantage was that its colonists brought the most advanced traditions from northwestern Europe and had a fertile terrain on which to develop them further. Both countries need to get away from the myth of uniqueness, which confounds their identities and favors irresponsible policies such as isolationism.

From the start, the United States' separation from Britain was coupled with a new Union of states through the Continental Congress, which had a stronger central government than ever existed under the old Imperial system. What the Revolution did for central government was to democratize and strengthen it, not abolish it.

Only the first point of the July 2, 1776, resolution, declaring independence, was easy to fulfill; it needed just a few days. The others were postponed. It took the Founders years to work out confederation. But in the meantime, independence was declared and quickly sealed in blood.

The actual goals of the Founders went beyond independence to include alliance and Union. Democratic government and Union were their permanent goals; independence and alliances were only means to the ends.

As everyone knows, the Founding Fathers came to independence reluctantly, as a lesser evil. But the implications of this are startling: Today's idealization of independence mystifies their original intention.

The Founders would have preferred a federal and democratic reform within the Empire, with more representation and more autonomy. The Continental Congress's 1775 resolution called for "reconciliation on reasonable terms" and preservation of the "empire." The Virginia convention's resolution of 1776 concluded independence was necessary because "a reunion with that [British] people on just and liberal terms" was impossible.

Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence regretted the loss of the wider Union -- "we might have been a free and great people together." Still, it preserved a new Union, which could grow much larger because it was founded on universal principles. Independence was finally declared in the name of the "United States of America" speaking as "one people."

When the war ended and George Washington resigned his command of the Continental Army in 1783, he wrote in his original Farewell Address that independence might yet prove to be a curse, not a blessing. The merit of it, he warned, would depend on whether the Union was preserved and strengthened.

Two centuries later, with the United Nations, NATO and the EU, progress was finally made on integration, in addition to federalism.

Then it all got lost in Vietnam, amid despair over the absurdity of world security hinging on the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation. "Small is beautiful" took over as the slogan, pushing out the old spirit of "bigger and better." The Constitution was re-reinterpreted as a system of checks and balances on central power, rather than removing the excessive restraints on central power. Americans began, once again, preaching the opposite of what they practiced.

Even when the goal of the American Revolution is accurately understood as freedom and Union, it still encompasses only half of the Founders' intentions, As men of the Enlightenment, they looked forward to the freedom and Union of all the world. Washington and Franklin lived to see the United States part of their goal fulfilled with the Constitution. The rest they left to posterity.

(Ira Straus is Fulbright professor of international relations in Moscow and senior associate at the Program on Transitions to Democracy in Washington, D.C.)

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