Ottoman Algeria in Western Diplomatic History with ... - Bibliothèque

good of mankind. 6
Accordingly, by opening markets, which is the antithesis of
mercantilist thought and practice as discussed earlier, the colonial powers
would stop making wars and people would live in peace. By linking national
interest to the general good of mankind, the Americans argued, “foreign policy
would become more moral.” 7
By the end of the 18 th century, that idea evolved and came to mean that
the moral of the United States, because it was a republic, was superior to that
of the European states because they were monarchies; thus appeared the
“notion of ‘moral superiority’ of American foreign policy.” 8
Consequently, the
Americans came to believe that, because of that moral superiority, their new
mission was to meliorate the world; hence the doctrine of ‘meliorism’ which
became a founding principle in American foreign. 9 The French historian Jean-
Baptiste Duroselle (1917-1994) called that approach “unconscious
nationalism” which made the Americans “sincerely” believe that “what is good
for America is good for the world.” 10 The concept of national interest mixed up
with the idea of meliorism, result of a nationalistically inflated ego, ended up in
jingoism, i.e.: belligerent nationalism. In matters of foreign policy, that unusual
blend was going to express itself for the first time during the so-called Barbary
Wars, 1801-1816 in the form of what is traditionally termed ‘gunboat
6 SJ, 2:335, October 17, 1780.
7 Jean-Batiste Duroselle, La France et les Etats-Unis: des origines à nos jours (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1976), p. 37.
8 Ibid., p. 37.
9 “Meliorism” is founded on the belief that human society has a natural tendency to improve and that
humans can consciously assist this process of its betterment. “Meliorism,” Microsoft Encarta Premium
Suite 2005. (Accessed 12 Nov. 2008).
10 Duroselle, La France et les Etats-Unis, p. 37.
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