The design of the young American Founding Fathers was not struck off overnight. It took two years to hammer out that design and to put it into effect. Each problem and challenge had to be examined in the light of historical experience and common sense. Failures of previous governments became the raw materials for constructing a durable new model. Of all these failures, none was more dramatic, significant, or insistent than the collapse of the American states themselves in their ill-fated experience before federation.

This failure, indeed, was to serve as the impetus for the enduring structure that became the United States; but the fact and implications of that failure are not generally understood today by Americans themselves.

The popular notion about the origin of the United States government is that the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were part of a single historical process. There were years of disintegration and deterioration after the end of the Revolution. The United States was not born in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence but in 1789 when the U.S. Constitution came into being.

Before the United States could be born, the 13 sovereign American governments had to undergo a collapse of mammoth proportions. John Fiske, in The Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789, wrote a sobering account of this collapse. The 13 states thought they could retain predominant sovereignty and still be at peace with one another. After 1783, when the treaty was signed with England, the American states slid into a period of disruption bordering on anarchy. New York and New Jersey shot it out in the harbor over the right to tax incoming ships. Pennsylvania and New Jersey never could agree on a mutually satisfactory border. Connecticut and Massachusetts were at odds over the acquisition of western territories. The value of a citizen's currency would shrink 10 percent when he or she crossed a state line. Thus a citizen who started out from New Hampshire with $100 in his pocket would have $20.24 left by the time he arrived in Georgia--without having spent a cent.

Men of reason were convinced that it was a fallacy to suppose that 13 separate sovereign states could exist within a compressed geographic unit. They came together at Philadelphia in 1787 because the situation confronting the states was intolerable. They had no way of knowing whether they could create a new design acceptable to each of the separate states. But they hoped that the results of their efforts might produce a groundswell of popular support that would create an imperative for ratification by the individual legislatures.

The most distinctive feature of the document created at Philadelphia was its federalist principles. The individual states retained jurisdiction over their own territories while yielding authority on all matters concerned with common dangers and common needs. This meant that a central authority spoke and acted for all the states in their collective relationship to the rest of the world.

The main contribution to history of the American Founding Fathers, therefore, was their delineation of the principles by which peace among sovereign units could be created and maintained. They had studied the basic causes of war all the way back to the conflict between Athens and Sparta. They understood the imperatives of geography. They knew that the freedoms of the individual would erode without a structured framework of order for society itself.

The peace of the world today is precarious because many of the sovereign units, especially the major ones, are unwilling to accept, or even to consider, the principles that alone can establish workable world order and thus guarantee their peace and independence. The United States, against the background of its history and traditions, has a natural reason to proclaim these principles. We can perform a great service to ourselves and to the cause of world peace by refuting the notion that the highest value is absolute national sovereignty. We can carry the banner for the idea that world peace cannot be achieved, nor the natural rights of human beings protected and enlarged, without a genuine world order.

It will be said that to draw a parallel between the failures of the American states from 1783 to 1787 and the United Nations' situation today is to overstretch historical analogy. It will be claimed that the hundred or so sovereignties in the present world are too diffuse, too far-flung, too complex, to be compared with the 13 states. But one can almost hear James Madison or Alexander Hamilton saying, as they did in The Federalist Papers, that historical principles transcend the size and complexity of the case at hand. The larger the problem, they said, the more pertinent the principle. And the principle that informed their efforts at Philadelphia, and that has meaning for us today, is that the only way to eliminate anarchy is by establishing law. They would say the only security for Americans today, or for any people, is in the creation of a system of world order that enables nations to retain sovereignty over their cultures and institutions but that creates a workable authority for regulating the behavior of the nations in their relationships with one another. They would recognize the mountainous complexities to be surmounted, but they would also believe that there are nuclear imperatives which dictate the need for world law.

In 1976, Henry Steele Commager's "A Declaration of Interdependence" was prepared under the auspices of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. All the beautiful sounds that came out of the Revolution and out of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention were adapted to our time in the Commager draft. There were also clear echoes of Lincoln and Wilson and F.D.R. The central thrust of the document was that the world was in need of a great unifying idea at a time of clearly visible common dangers and common needs.

World federalism may seem too remote a goal to serve as the basis for immediate efforts. But a world that is ingenious enough to create the means of nuclear incineration ought to be resourceful enough to devise a way out with a time schedule to match.