claremontreviewofbooks.com/making-citizens/Claremont Review of Books Login Prev Article Vol. III Number 3, Summer 2003 Making Citizens Next Article Vol. III Number 3, Summer 2003 Essays https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/making-citizens/ Making Citizens The good American and the good European. by William B. Allen
The French Revolution lacked such modesty; it declared illegitimate every foundation of social order except those mirroring the events that transpired in France. Instead of identifying the French nation as having a peculiar title to these revolutionary claims, and urging the rest of mankind to act accordingly, the French revolutionaries ended by separating human beings rather than uniting them. The reason is that on these terms a Frenchman is no longer a Frenchman, strictly speaking. A Frenchman is merely a human being, with no more fellow feeling for his neighbor or fellow citizen than for a stranger 1,000 leagues away. There is no intrinsic, social principle by which one can argue that neighbors ought to sustain one another, apart from going through the task of establishing a social contract and constitution and committing themselves to a specific political (not social) order, whose laws are binding with all the strength called for by Rousseau’s “general will.” Which implies, further, an exaggeration of homogeneity among men. Men in such circumstances are not truly citizens and certainly not patriots. They are Hobbesian subjects, whose fate in world politics must depend either on their own power or on the opportunity to benefit as free-riders from other people who are distinctly non-Hobbesian (i.e., who defend themselves without subjecting others). Thus the Euro-American divergence is nothing other than the divergence between the original French and American revolutions. Fifteen or so years ago, I was invited to present my reflections on the subject of European integration at a conference in Treviso, Italy. I spoke on America’s transition from a loose federation to a genuine state-nation, indicating along the way the potential benchmarks that would signal Europe’s progress toward integration. At the conference, however, I learned that I had misconstrued its subject. My hosts were primarily interested in the question of how to deal with the then burgeoning numbers of mainly North African, and to some extent Asian, immigrants flowing into their countries. Specifically, they wanted to learn how to guarantee the immigrants their fundamental rights, without at all conveying title to citizenship, French, Italian, or what have you. In short, they wanted to devise humane principles of integration that, in the end, would differ little from the long-standing German post-war “guest worker” program that brought so many Turks into Germany.
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/making-citizens/ Making Citizens The good American and the good European. by William B. Allen ... ...If we revert to the eras of the American and French Revolutions, we can detect the origins of these divergent strains of thought. They derive from the false universalism of European ideas of revolution. The French Revolution was not carried out in the name of this particular people, the French, but in the name of humanity. The revolution in the United States, by contrast, had an impact that was worldwide (as Lincoln correctly observed, the example of the United States would continue to do so) principally by structuring peoples’ expectations of political decency. Although the Declaration of Independence appeals to the “candid” judgment of the world, and the first Federalist holds that the American founding settles a question for mankind and not just for the United States, this revolution was not directed outside the immediate poli...
