Research Proposal on "Ripple Effects of American Independence"

Research Proposal 14 pages (4742 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

The Ripple Effects of American Independence

The United States and the United Kingdom are today great partners on

a divided world stage. Ironically, we may argue that this is a

relationship which in its worst straits would help to plant the seeds for a

reciprocating progressiveness that would leap back and forth across the

Atlantic through the coming century. Bred in the thick of British

colonialism, the United States would surface into existence with an

ingrained nod to monarchical elitism and a full-fledged thrust toward

constitutional democracy. The transition would suggest a new caveat to the

people, with the expectations of political involvement and activism

promoting suitable elected representation. In the United Kingdom, the rule

of the British Crown and a feudalist system with highly unequal

socioeconomic propensities, helped to maintain a culture of political

ignorance amongst the publics while assuring leadership, authority and

wealth to those who had inherited it. The events unfolding in the United

States, though the point may well be debated in a historiographical

discourse, may to a certain perspective be seen as the catalyst to the

realization in Europe of political ideals theretofore only available in

philosophical rhetoric. Thus, the impact of their actualization in the

burgeoning United States would send a signal soon heeded by the French.

And as the French Revolution would unfold into the era of Napoleonic

expansionism, soon much of Europe would fall under the pale of

constitutional democracy. The discussion here demonstrates that in the

immediacy with which the French Revolution would succeed the American

Revolution, the commonality of their respective aspirations toward

constitutionality and their common struggles to define a balance between

democratic governance and a centralization of authority descendent from

monarchical principles, we can make the observation that France would

represent a first and most crucial lynchpin in directing the external

resistance to feudalism of America's revolution to the internal needs in a

drastically unequal Europe.

Certainly, the American Revolution was by explicit intent championed

as a break from the philosophical repugnance of European feudalism, and

most directly, British colonialism. Rejecting monarchy, the United States

had presumed to stand in principled opposition to the undemocratic impulses

which had instigated its founding. But the divide between the ideals of

its British background and its progressive principles was immediately party

to the structure of its originating government. Indeed, "the evolution of

America's political parties was to a great extent the outgrowth of the

British political system, which in an oversimplified analysis, can be said

to have been divided into conservatives, who tended to support the monarchy

and the power of the King, and liberals, who sought to restrain royal

prerogatives and enhance the legitimacy of Parliament as an alternate power

source." (Sage, 1) This is a matter of its emergent identity which we will

subject to discussion hereafter. However, we can see that in its vying for

independence, the United States would still demonstrate in some ways its

immediate cultural relationship to Europe while explicitly seeking an

evolution in the terms surrounding this culture.

America's fight for independence would emerge quite naturally out of

the needs of its people to establish a form of governance, of economy and

of society reflective of the demands created by the path of development of

the colonies. Moreover, this need would be increasingly revealed in the

sentiments of progressive thinkers and public authorities throughout the

European and American intellectual communities who were increasingly

beginning to think according to an ethical standard concerning the

treatment of all men. The late 18th and early to mid-19th century would be

distinguished in the history of man as a period given over to revelations

regarding the rights of man, resolutions concerning the proper governing of

societies and rumblings of equality in parts of the world perpetually-to

that point-understood in terms of sharp divisions across class, ethnicity

and religion. Western Europe would largely be the seat of conception for

the philosophical and discursive advancement of this period, with the

intellectual centers of urban France and Germany serving as forum for the

elevation of man as an individual and as part of a collective brotherhood.

During a historical period which would come to be seen as the

Enlightenment, various subjugated groups seized the emergent opportunity to

demand the rights accorded them by the supreme creator. Fundamental

amongst the principles of enlightenment would be the set of considerations

put forth by a man, ironically, from the seat of America's subjugation.

In his consideration on the balance between the presence of central

leadership and the will of the individual, British political philosopher

John Locke offers an evaluation of power which draws its inspiration from

the natural law of reason.

In an analogy upon which we may base a thorough discourse on this

predilection, Locke describes a circumstance which he contends is

indicative of the inalienable capacity of each man toward choice,

regardless of the presence or absence of an intervening authority. He

remarks that "a thief, whom I cannot harm, but by appeal to the law, for

having stolen all that I am worth, I may kill, when he sets on me to rob me

but of my horse or coat; because the law, which was made for my

preservation, where it cannot interpose to secure my life from present

force, which, if lost, is capable of no reparation, permits me my own

defence" (Locke, Section 19). Here is the truest manifestation of Locke's

promise that reason will ultimately dictate a power structure. Even as the

law is a most imposing presence once one has entered into the confines of

the social contract at the center of Locke's premise, it is a mere shadow

of a consideration in the context described above. When threatened, and if

given the opportunity, each man will have the power to defend himself.

Executor of his own justice, in this scenario, a man is shown to make the

active decision to exit the social contract. Where law and reason under

traditional circumstances suggest that such rationality will be shared

amongst all interactants within the physical confines of the social

contract, when such can be evidently determined as to not be a mutual

quality of intersecting parties-as with Locke's thief hypothetical-then

one's obligation to the social contract is considerably diminished.

Thus, to the Americans, who saw that the monarchy which governed and

exploited them from afar was irrationally suited for their purposes,

Locke's ideology is a visible presence in key revolutionary American

writings. Indeed, America's most important contribution to the world

community was both actual amd philosophical. Essentially, its actionable

revolution demonstrated that the forces of monarchy could be dismantled,

that a balance of democracy could be achieved and that the ideals of the

rights of man were something more than mere rhetoric. Many of the most

important pieces of literature contributing to the revolution would be

fundamental in the formulation of events the world over during the 19th

century. Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet Common Sense remains the most famous

and representative of such literature. And indeed, the sentiment here

delivered helps to explain how the patriots prevailed in conflict with the

mighty British military, offering a template to the numerous independence

movements which would be spurred in the wake of America's birth.

Naturally, most prevalent among these would be France, whose tumultuous

transition from feudalism to democracy would see it through myriad stages

while offering a lighted path to so many other nations in Europe. .

In a text designed to produce a sense of revolutionary outrage, Paine

crafts a philosophical treatise on appropriate governance designed to

counter that which had very organically emerged in the colonies with the

increasingly archaic nature of monarchy such as that imposed upon the

colonists by the British. In his pamphlet, Paine openly calls for and

advocates armed resistance as a means to the defense of the economic and

governmental systems developing separate from the British Crown. He

characterizes the distinction between kingship and the evolving colonial

democracy as being irreconcilable, contending that "men of all ranks have

embarked in the controversy, from different motives, and with various

designs; but all have been ineffectual, and the period of debate is closed.

Arms, as the last resource, decide the contest." (Paine, 82) Couched in

Paine's sense of righteous indignation, the text largely drives toward this

point by making the concerted argument that the colonists can tolerate the

imposition of kingship so far as they can tolerate the sacrifice of the

freedoms which had become inherently associated to persistence in the

nascent America. This would be the undercurrent that would sweep the

colonists into vehement support for the cause of independence, drawing a

core philosophical connection between the anticipated form of government

and the emotional disposition of those with the means to achieve it. And

as this discussion shows, those means would be shown to be within the reach

of dramatically outsized forces such as the American colonists, encouraging

soon after the far more robustly numbered French peasantry to cast aside

the shackles… READ MORE

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