Saturday, July 4, 2026

The Declaration of Independence at 250

Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the signing of a Declaration of Independence by representatives, or delegates, from thirteen British colonies in North American, a rare copy was discovered at the British government’s archives. Besides the obvious irony, how the copy had come into the possession of the British is a reminder of just how much the rebelling colonists risked by taking on the mighty British Empire. Although the task of actually achieving political independence must have seemed formidable, the political elites on both sides “of the pond” (i.e., the Atlantic Ocean) had already grasped the inherent instability in there being an empire within an empire, for an empire as a political category or type consists of kingdom-level polities rather than empires. The British Empire had run aground in terms of the logic, and the American Revolution can be interpreted as a working-out of the illogic.

Having been a young teenager when America celebrated its bicentennial, I was less than taken with marking the passage of just fifty more years in 2026. Similarly, anyone who remembers New Year’s 2000, which marked a change of year, decade, century, and millennium (!) would be hard-pressed to get excited about departing from 2025 to begin 2026, for example. Even so, the number 250, half of 500, catches the eye. Even though 250 years is but a blink in the expanse of human history, let alone human existence (1.8 million years!), the passage of even just 250 years can come with a significant loss, and even misconstruing, of a historical event as it was perceived in its time by participants and onlookers.

The long odds in 13 “former” colonies taking on the armed forces of the British Empire could scarcely be grasped on July 4, 2026. How the rare copy of the document fell into the hands of the British provides us with a glimpse of the actual risks. The document, which is “one of the rarest forms of the Declaration we know about,” “was seized by the Royal Navy after the capture of the privateer ship Dalton on Christmas Eve in 1776.”[1] The capture came after seven hours of pursuit by the Royal Navy ship HMS Raisonable off the coast of Portugal. Over a hundred men were subsequently taken prisoner and stayed in prison in Britain under very harsh conditions, including food deprivation, for years until freed in a prisoner-exchange. It not for nothing that Benjamin Franklin remarked at the signing of the Declaration, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” He knew what they were up against, and what could befall them at the hands of the British. He also knew why urging the delegates of the then-former colonies to stick together in the conduct of the war, which would doubtlessly long unless easily snuffed out by the empire’s forces, for the colonies were declaring their respective independences concurrently, rather than creating one new nation. This point had by 2026 been largely lost to history.

The heading of the document consists of the following: “In Congress, July 4, 1776, DECLARATION by the REPRESENTATIVES of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in GENERAL CONGRESS Assembled.” Parsing this heading, the word Congress then meant an international political meeting (or “summit” in modern political parlance), rather than a country’s legislative body. The self-declared independent polities were called states generically because their respective forms of government (e.g., kingdom, republic) had yet to be decided by their already-existing legislatures. The words, United States of America, referred to the states being united rather than to a country with its own government and comprising states. In fact, prior to independence, the title United Colonies had been used on both sides of the ocean, albeit with a baleful connotation on the British side. Not only did the United Colonies not refer to anything formal politically, but also both the colonial and the British elites, according to the Massachusetts-born historian George Bancroft, viewed the United Colonies as empire-scale, and thus an empire at least in expanse within an empire, which was believed to be an inherently unstable arrangement because the empire within the empire would almost certainly eventually break free. Some people even ascribed the label empire to New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South, such that the United Colonies consisted of three empires—yet another unstable arrangement.[2] Accordingly, Franklin urged the delegates from the independent new states to hang together; it was not only because United action would be necessary to defeat the British Empire. In 1776, no one thought of the title, United States, as referring to a country, so the latter misconstruing of the heading as referring to the United States as a country having begun then is inaccurate. On July 4, 1776, what would become that country with a federal system of dual sovereignty could only be anticipated, and thus understood as being formed by sovereign countries.

That 13 countries began on July 4, 1776, even though only years later recognized as such by the British, rather than a country called the United States of America, has implications for comparative politics generally and comparative federalism in particular. Just as sovereign countries under the Articles of Confederation joined the U.S. in 1789, so too sovereign countries began and have joined the E.U. since its founding on 1 November, 1993. Unlike international organizations, such as the European Coal and Steel Community and the Economic Community, the E.U. is federal characterized principally by governmental sovereignty being held both by the states and the Union itself. Just as the U.S. States are members of the U.S. institutionally at the federal level in the U.S. Senate, the E.U. states have direct federal involvement in the Council of Ministers, which like the U.S. Senate, is legislative, and in the European Council, which can be likened to the U.S. Senate when it is in executive session and to the National Governors Association, which does not have formal power. However, by glancing over at the European Council, it can be understood that the governors assembled could play a formal role at the federal level in the setting of priorities for that Union. Such insights are potentially of great advantage in doing comparative federalism in line with historical contexts rather than from contemporary reformulations of the past.