World Unity 38

    The nation-state is a European invention. The Romans began the long fight to establish their empire beginning as a tribe living among the 7 hills of Rome. European nations developed typically in patterns of historical experiences much like those of the Romans, but the Romans ended up with an empire, the Europeans with the nation-state. The Romans fought heroic battles to enlarge their territory. They subdued neighboring tribes and established new borders and then went beyond the borders to new conquests. So did Europeans. The Romans made a central city, Rome, the seat of their expanded territory. The Europeans did the same setting up London and Paris, Madrid and Lisbon and other European cities as the seat of some expanded territory. The Romans took their tribal language, Latin, refined it and forced it on the natives of their conquered territories. The English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and all the other leading tribes of other European territories did the same. The most powerful confederation of tribes selected one of many languages, refined it and forced it on all the remaining tribes in their nation-state. The Romans won heroic life and death struggles with enemies to confirm their conquests and their imperial identity as Romans in a settled territory with a distinct language. The Europeans did the same except that they called their newly founded empires states. The European states grew up over long periods of crises and wars into firmly established unities of peoples with racial similarities and with well developed languages protected by armies eager for glorious a  wars to vindicate their national honor. The African and American states never went through similar experiences. Europeans left them with the boundaries of states and with European languages but without a living inner kernel of common creative and dramatic historical experience necessary to give birth to a genuine nation

    The union of the thirteen original sovereign American states was a unique construction. The American Constitution is generally understood to have been a masterful creation using doctrines of revolutionary European political theorists of the age of enlightenment. This is not true. Rationalist philosophers in Europe railed against the endless wars among their European nation-states but none of them theorized about setting up some kind of new supranational government whose purpose and being was designed to unite states rather than to be only just another national state among national states. The government of the United States of America was just such a supranational creation. The government in Washington set up by the Constitution was “The Government of the United States”. It had a purpose and a being for the united states not over the united states. Washington D.C., a non-state located in no state, was the seat of a government of a union of 13 sovereign states who had each dared to legally limit their sovereignty to receive the benefits of free interstate commerce and citizenship. The government of a nation-state restricts the freedom of its citizens by imprisoning them within borders. A union of states continually opens up for its citizens grand possibilities beyond all borders. European nation-states limit for their citizens what is possible. The 50 American states teach their citizens that there are no limits and that everything is possible.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall