Showing posts with label George Bancroft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Bancroft. Show all posts

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.

Tuesday, April 14, 2026

E.U. States and US Economies Compared Economically

Even in reporting and analyzing seemingly-objective economic data for comparative purposes, political ideology can creep in if that instinctual urge is powerful enough. Even in comparisons of political entities that are on the same level (e.g., city, region/province, kingdom, empire), “word-games” can be used to suggest that the republics being compared are on different political levels. The use of linguistic subterfuge is, I submit, underhanded and based on a stubborn refusal to admit to oneself that the two or more political entities being compared are indeed on the same level, rather than one being higher than the other. In the case of comparing GDP and GDP per capita between E.U. and U.S. states, the very fact that the states are being compared to each other, rather than a state in one union to another union (as if a state in one political union were equivalent to another union of states—a category mistake to be sure!), means that the respective states are in fact equivalent even though different labels are used according to whether a given state is in one union or another. In arguing these points, I shall juxtaposition the respective labels to highlight the absurdity of using different labels for ideological purposes.

In mid-April, 2026, Euronews, which reflects Euroskeptic language in order to appease critics of the E.U., reported that top E.U. states and U.S. republics were roughly similar in “economic size rankings.”[1] Even though E.U. states, like U.S. states, were (and had been) semi-sovereign states, Euronews belied its own economic likeness of the respective economic sizes of big states in both unions by erroneously inventing the label, “EU countries” just before “US states.” Then, in the next paragraph, the journalist used the label, “European economies” for the E.U. states yet retained US states. In English, the expression, “Something funny is going on here” is a way of applying suspicion to another person’s underlying motives. In other words, something more is going on in the writing of the article than merely comparing economic numbers. This is the idea.

The “word games” bent on subtly overlaying differentials are undercut when we turn to the numbers themselves. In terms of GDP, the list from highest to lowest shows E.U. states and U.S. states clustered: Germany, California, France, Texas, Italy, New York, Spain, and Florida. That big states in one union of states are economically equivalent to big states in the other union is good evidence that the respective states in the two unions are equivalent more generally. To take one example, the GDP of Spain in 2025 was €1.687 trillion and that of Florida was €1.624 trillion.[2] To be sure, in making more general comparisons between the two semi-sovereign states, Spain’s greater size, 3.6 times the territorial size of Florida, is significant. However, that Spain’s 505,990 square kilometers falls between the 423,970 of California and the 695,662 of Texas strongly suggests that in terms of territory, the large (and small) states of the respective unions cluster together, rather than it being the case that a large state in one union clusters with the other union overall. To be sure, the exception to this is Alaska being larger than the E.U. itself, but otherwise, the large states in the two unions cluster not only in terms of economic output, but also geographical size.

The article’s report of GDP per capita even puts some large U.S. states above even large E.U. states because New York, California, Illinois, Texas, and Florida have higher numbers than do the Netherlands, Germany, France and Italy. The bar-graph in the article even has all of the states in blue whereas the U.S. and E.U. are in other colors so those two unions could be compared to each other. Even though the graph is labeled as “EU’s top 5 economies vs. top 5 U.S. states” (notice, too, the subtle, selective use of periods in “U.S.” but not “EU” as if this means that the latter is an organization rather than a union of states!), that all of the states are shown with blue bars indicates that the states of the respective unions are equivalent (and that the unions can be compared with each other, rather than to a state).

In making the argument of state-equivalence, out of which I derived union-equivalence, I once read the ten volumes of George Bancroft’s History of the United States of America, From the Discovery of the American Continent after having taken Joanne Freeman’s Yale course on the American Revolutionary War. In writing British Colonies Forge an American Empire: A Basis for Trans-Atlantic Comparisons, I wanted to highlight that according to Bancroft’s studies, people on both sides of the Atlantic viewed the British colonies as being on the scale of the countries in Europe at the time. Bancroft reports in his texts that both the political elite in the colonies and in the British Empire’s host kingdom (i.e., Britain) tended to view the United Colonies as being on the empire- rather than kingdom-level.[3] In fact, even New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and Southern (informal) sub-groups of colonies were viewed as empires in themselves by some people! Not just a few British politicians were nervous about there being an empire (or empires!) within the empire; an empire consists of kingdom-level political entities. That both Virginia and Ireland were regarded as members of the British Empire is strong evidence that the British colonies in North America were regarded from the start in the Greek rather than the Roman sense of a colonialization (i.e., a colony constructed to be equivalent to the host country rather than as a part thereof; for example, a city-state in Greece creating another city-state). This is the historical underpinning for my conclusion that the U.S. states, rather than the U.S. itself, are equivalent to E.U. states, and therefore I submit that the claim that a state of the E.U. is equivalent to the U.S. is a political category mistake. In historical terms, no one would have claimed that a kingdom and an empire are equivalent because empires consisted of kingdoms. That both a free-standing, or free, kingdom and an empire were both sovereign does not make the two equivalent because sovereignty is merely an attribute rather than definitive.  

Comparative politics can extend beyond comparing types of political systems (e.g., democracy, autocracy) to consider the matter of equivalence in terms of city-states, regions, kingdoms, and empires. Early in the seventeenth century, the European jurisprud Althusius wrote Political Digest on federalism based on the Holy Roman Empire. In his text, he clearly distinguished between the different levels in a federation: the guilds, the cities, the regions, the kingdoms, and the empire. His theory of federalism has the next-lower being members (and thus represented) in the next-higher, with individuals being members only of the guilds. His isomorphic federalism is more the case in the E.U. than the U.S. because none of the American states have federal systems. By viewing the E.U. and the U.S. as equivalent, Althusius’s theory could be seen to be applicable to the U.S., especially in regard to that union’s large, internally heterogenous states like California, Illinois, and New York. Comparing apples with apples, and oranges with oranges in comparative politics can indeed have such significant practical benefits, but not if Europeans and Americans go on treating individual states in one union as being equivalent to the other union rather than to states thereof.

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