The formation of American exceptional identities: A three-tier model of the “standard of civilization” in US foreign policy

Abstract

The dominant structuralist/materialist schema in International Relations accords little importance to the domestic ideational base of the state in its concern to explain the pattern of foreign policy. In contrast, my article, following the tenets of unit-level constructivism, asks how American identity was formed, contested, and manifested through its interaction with two significant others — the European empires and the Native Americans — in the USA’s formative era in order to understand the origins of American liberal internationalism and popular imperialism. I argue that the US identity was constituted in two different ways: as a transformative state against the Westphalian system and as a civilizing force over “barbarian” natives. The two main US foreign policy orientations — the Jeffersonian tradition and the Jacksonian tradition — were produced by these ambivalent American selves. In this context, a hierarchical, tripartite model of the “standard of civilization” in the American security imaginary emerged at the turn of the 19th century: the USA at the top as a revolutionary vanguard in human history; European international society, which should be negotiated and reformed in America’s own image later, in the middle; and the “Rest” at the bottom, which need to be removed or assimilated.