Unlike other republican constitutions, the US Constitution does not allow states to secede from the republic once they join. Like a marriage, the Union is “till death do us part.”
The US is a perpetual union.
I write about this unique but important element of the US Constitution in my book The Art of the Compromise. A state can not leave the Union legally; it can leave through extraconstitutional methods, i.e., civil war.
“If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2006, “it is that there is no right to secede.“ Justice Scalia was responding to a letter from Dan Turkewitz, a fiction screenwriter who had written a political comedy in which the state of Maine had seceded from the US to join Canada.
By Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States – Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41258425.
Scalia’s response goes to the crux of the constitutional crisis that the Civil War indued. Was the Union perpetual? Is the American Soul perpetual?
To this question, scholar Kenneth Stampp asks in his writings, “Did the [Constitution] create a union of sovereign states, each of which retained the right to secede at its own discretion? Or did it create a union from which no state, once having joined, could escape except by an extra-constitutional act of revolution?”
The Soviet Union was not a perpetual union, and the European Union, as we have seen with Brexit, is not one either. Their member states can and have severed their bonds within their respective unions at will. With little fanfare, the Soviet Union split up, and with Brexit, the United Kingdom left the EU as a punchline.
In the US, the Civil War made clear that our Union is perpetual. Once a state joins, there are no takebacks. States are not permitted to withdraw from the Union. Such an unbreakable bond is necessary to nurture one shared national identity.
Unlike a union of convenience, where states can enter and exit at will, the binding force of a perpetual union encourages citizens of each state to look beyond their state boundaries in duty, obligation, and sacrifice for the greater good.
In contrast, a more tentative at-will union prioritizes citizens to look inward within each state for a self-oriented ethos. This inward-looking temper, rather than outward-looking, is evident in the EU today as member states focus singularly inward rather than collectively outward.
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In a 2018 article for Foreign Affairs, Helen Thompson writes about this issue, stating that the EU “has always struggled to accommodate the democratic politics of its members.” She is writing about the eurozone sovereign debt crisis at the time but notes that the EU is continually bouncing from “crisis after crisis with no lasting solution.”
It is little wonder that London chose Brexit to leave with the easy route rather than stay and do the hard work for the good of the whole EU. The UK, given a choice, would prefer to look out for themselves. The permanence of the Union in the US means that running away is not an option when the going gets tough. The American states are in it together and must work together to solve challenges.
The EU is a strange beast. It is not a political or fiscal union per se but rather a political and economic grouping bound through a monetary union. In the case of Europe and Brexit, the EU could not accommodate the UK’s domestic problems, as Thompson notes, and could not reduce unemployment in southern Europe. The loose union in the EU could not herd the cats of its nation-states.
In the US, when unemployment rises in one state or a natural disaster occurs in another, the perpetual Union, with a focus on the long haul, does a better job—though imperfect—of coordinating the states’ collective action.
In the book Hamilton’s Blessing (Gordon, 2010), John Steel Gordon lays out the history. He makes a case for Alexander Hamilton’s counterintuitive insight: “A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. It will be a powerful cement to our union.”
Vitold Muratov- скан и дигитализация., CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
In the US, an endless union is about one’s commitment to the nation; an at-will union, like the EU, is about one’s commitment to self within the union. This sentiment is the essence of John Kennedy’s famous 1961 inaugural address when he challenged the nation to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Kennedy called on Americans to commit to service and sacrifice for their greater good rather than their petty differences.
In the EU, member states ask what the EU can do for their individual state, where citizens first consider themselves Austrian, Belgian, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. In the US, the perpetual Union has bound member states towards a greater good where we first think of ourselves as Americans. When leaving is an option, asking what one can do for the greater good takes second place.
My analogy to divorce in the title of this blog is not a casual one. Evidence of divorce’s negative impact on children, finances, and happiness, is growing. When failure is an option, it’s easy for one spouse to abandon the other. The commitment is weak.
When failure is not an option, like NASA and Apollo 13, the possibility of failing is unacceptable. The commitment is strong. Everyone is all in to achieving success at all costs. The consequences are dire, but as Abe Lincoln knew, “till death do us part” is essential and the “dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
