Certain dates serve as signposts in the fog of history. The Fourth of July is one such date. Everybody knows that the Fourth of July commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In fact, the Declaration was adopted by Congress on July 2, which legally broke the tie to England right then, and the first Independence celebration in 1777 was held on the appropriate date, July 2. Congress later changed the date to the Fourth, for reasons that are obscure.
But who cares about the exact date? One day or another, we have a big national anniversary coming up, because it fulfills the golden rule that important anniversaries must be celebrated in multiples of ten, fifty, and a hundred. We didn’t go all out with flags and fistfights for the 249th anniversary of the Declaration. It passed almost unnoticed, just as a 49th wedding anniversary is no big deal, but a 50th, or 60th, or a 70th may get your picture in the local paper.
It is the anniversary of something every day of the year, and obviously, some anniversaries are more important than others. Fifty years ago today, June 29th, the Conference of Communist and Workers Parties met in Berlin, which is an incredibly boring anniversary. But the one coming up on Saturday marks a historical event of huge importance. The American colonists desperately needed and wanted to break free from the power of the tyrannical King George the Third, who oppressed them with taxes and tariffs. But it wasn’t really about economics; it was about Independence, a word that has a fine, liberating ring to it.
There are movements for independence all over the world all the time. The driving force of all these movements is simply that we like our own territory and way of life, and we tend not to trust strangers. It’s natural to prefer to live in a familiar place with people like us, and to be governed by people like us who speak the same language and wear the same hats. The impulse to divide the world into “Us” and “Them” may not be a noble one, but it most certainly is reassuring. How else can we know who the enemy is?
Independence poses the most basic of all political questions, namely “What is a nation?” There are almost two hundred recognized nations in the world, but there could easily be two thousand if every independence movement succeeded. Nationalism is back with a vengeance: Uigars in China, French speakers in Quebec, Flemish speakers in Belgium, English speakers in Alberta and Oregon – the list of restive minorities who want independence is enormous. Even a large, almost English-speaking nation like the United States sometimes seems like a patchwork of smaller nations pulling in different directions.
What was so revolutionary about the Declaration of Independence was that, in one bold rhetorical stroke, it declared the question of nationhood redundant with the phrase “We the people of the United States.” Given the deep and bitter divisions in the country in 1776, the whole document was condemned by many as a fantasy. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham called it “Absurd,” and few people thought that the union would survive the desire for independence among the various colonies because union is, logically, the opposite of independence. Ten years ago, the British left the European Union in search of independence and are still regretting it. But the United States is, miraculously, still more or less united after 250th years. That’s worth a celebration.
