The American Revolution and Universal Government: Part One

[Recently trying to describe my research project, I claimed that it was all about the possibility of universal government and its conflict with localism: not a frame I had previously made central to the project. It may be interesting to speculate why I did that. But here are thoughts on the issue itself.]

The Americans who supported the centralization of government for the union of all the independent states during the 1780s are often called nationalists. However this eighteenth-century context is outside the ambit of normal definitions and investigations into 'nationalism' [e.g. Gellner, Hobsbawm, Anderson, or for the British case, Colley]. Also, the idea of nationalism for me implies a narrowing of vision (from what? the globe, the West, or something else). In our American 1780s it is the opposite, a broadening of vision, away from the standard unit of politial existence, which was each former colony - each state. American 'nationalism' in this case was not parochial, but cosmopolitan [in Jackson Turner Main's word].

That is, within limits; limits set by race, and perhaps other factors. In Federalist #2 Jay gives a precociously nineteenth-century definition of nationhood:

"a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence."

Yet, note that his point is to unite Carolinians and Rhode Islanders, rather than to separate Americans from, say, Canadians. Like Jefferson's famous [much-loved by my supervisor] allowance for "supplemental insertions" into the Linnaean system, the Constitution made room not only for new western states but pre-existing ones (and Canada explicitly) to join the union under equal terms. While resistance in the 1760s and 70s upheld 'the rights of Englishmen,' the revolution was fought under the banner of 'self-evident truths.' The first and second paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence are ostentatiously general rather than specific to the situation of America or 1776.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another...

Jefferson refers here to "all men" and "mankind," but neither to Americans nor Britons. In this sense the Declaration is a progenitor to the 'universal' declarations of rights that were institutionalised by the French Revolution a decade later. The relationship between the two revolutions is key to the development of the issue of universal government, and crucially, to subsequent perspectives of it.