Proclaiming sovereignty; Glenda Sluga reviews The Declaration of Independence: A Global History.

The most recent states to emerge on the world scene appeared just over a decade ago. Almost all of them, over 30 in total, were the practical and political consequences of the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. All of these countries gained their independence through formal declaration. How and when does this declarative process of establishing political sovereignty work? Given the cultural, linguistic, and civilizational differences that are said to shape our world, how did we arrive at a globally shared language of statehood? These are among the questions that Harvard historian David Armitage tackles in his appropriately global history of the US Declaration of Independence, the document that began it all.

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The Declaration of Independence has long been regarded as national property. But where US popular lore sees mirrored in its words the image of the nation, Armitage sees the reflections of a wider world. Armitage writes that the Declaration was the first document in world history to make "such an announcement of statehood in the language of independence." His history explores the specific circumstances of the late eighteenth century that shaped the global characteristics of that document, as well as the ways in which it placed the US among, in the words of the Declaration, the "Powers of the Earth."

Late eighteenth century Europeans and Americans had a vision of their place in the world that was unprecedentedly comprehensive. They did and could travel widely and possessed the printing technology to spread information and produce maps. Above all, they traded--exchanging goods, currencies, and ideas, which traveled extensively. The Declaration of Independence owed its generic promiscuity as much to the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel's 1758 work The Law of Nations as to the model of the Dutch Revolt, which was regarded by the aspirational colonists as an example of a successful secession movement. In Armitage's engaging and energetic historical account, many interesting details color the international and transnational context of the late eighteenth century. As Thomas Jefferson described it, the Declaration was, for the colonists, an instrument "pregnant with our own and the fate of the world."

The original Declaration of Independence did not draw on any of the words we might expect to find in a more modern version: "independence," "nation," or "American." It did refer to "one people," the guarantee of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and the right of the individual to seek freedom from tyranny through the creation of a free independent state. But these were phrases invoked in order to legitimize the United States' place in a world system of states and to establish its legal status as a sovereign state. The Declaration addressed not the domestic populace, but international authority and the "opinions of mankind." Its intent was to establish statehood, not to forge a nation in the modern ethno-political sense.

Armitage details the Declaration's speedy transmission and translation; for instance, the first German translation was for the benefit of Philadelphia's German community. In addition to being published in newspapers, copies were sent formally along diplomatic routes and informally in the correspondence that crossed the Atlantic. The Spanish-American authorities were so fearful of the power of the Declaration's text that they attempted to obstruct its dissemination. Nevertheless, its words would echo in the Latin American revolutions of the early nineteenth century.

Despite the British government's initial refusal to accept the Declaration's claims, the document ultimately achieved its authors' aims. Why did it work? Partly because it declared a fact of separation, although not a fait accompli (victory in a war with Britain would have been required for that); partly because it was the culmination of a concentrated strategy of spin, letters, petitions, proposals, addresses, and speeches; and partly because it spoke to the implicit codes of an existing system of states and their intrinsic interdependence, even as it altered that system's scope for recognizing new states.

According to Armitage, there have been four historically distinct moments of declaring independence. The first was the age of revolutions in the early nineteenth century: the creation of new states out of the Spanish empire in South America and the breakaway of Greece and Serbia from the Ottomans. The second was the end of World War I: the disaggregation of the Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg and German empires. The third was the aftermath of World War II the decolonization period affecting the British and French empires. The fourth was the end of the Cold War: the dispersal of the composite lands of the Soviet Union and the tragic secession of the states of Yugoslavia. In these varying contexts, Armitage provides us with a concise account of the creation of the Declaration of Independence as an enduring genre of political document.

In all of these cases, the local and the global have been inextricably enmeshed, the national and international made interdependent. Armitage's argument is less certain when it speaks to the 20th century world and to the interwoven history of nationalism and statehood as distinctive bases of sovereignty. But Armitage warns the reader at the outset that the nation is not his chief concern; rather, this is the story of the emergence of a world of states from a world of empires, when independence "was associated with sovereignty and hence with juridical status rather than with national identities, whether ethnic, linguistic, historical, or religious." Armitage also makes the point that over this period, the changing political and cultural climates in which these declarations were made radically shifted, transforming the meanings and intentions of past and future declarations. It was only after 1812 that the Declaration of Independence became a national icon, generating "the same cross-party national fervor as the Fourth of July itself." In this phase, enthusiasts shifted their attention from the declaration's international purpose to its domestic significance. The second paragraph, which emphasized the goals of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," now defined the nation, even as the same phrase became one of the United States' greatest ideological exports to the world.

Armitage's global history of the Declaration of Independence is also a history of losers. The first imitation of the Declaration of Independence occurred within a year, ironically enough as the declaration of Vermont's independence from the newly independent United States. The infant United States refused to recognize Vermont's declaration on the grounds that "[i]f every district so disposed, may for themselves determine that they are not within the claim of the thirteen states ... we may soon have ten hundred states, all free and independent." Curiously too, this same argument was put by the executive of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (itself the second "Yugoslavia" to declare independence in the 20th century) in answer to the ultimately successful declarations of independence made by the states of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991. There is a handy listing in the substantial appendices of this volume of all the declarations of independence ever thrust upon the world. The failure of Vermont's declaration of independence, however, along with those of Abkhazia, Crimea, and Karadzjic's Republika Srpska, are a memorial to the speed with which the political dramas of the modern world, and its aspiring sovereign states, are forgotten.

These examples also return us to the questions of what makes for a successful declaration and why they are worthwhile. Without a doubt, this global history testifies to the power of words and ideas. It also speaks to the political astuteness of seeking the "opinions of mankind," since the resort to war has never guaranteed successful statehood. In an age of intensified globalization, it reminds us of the ways in which even outdated practices of the past intervene in the present. As the "powers of the earth" become concentrated in global capital, and the "opinions of mankind" are as powerfully presented by bloggers as by statesmen, declarations of independence seem a quaint reminder of a time when the creation of nation-states promised the world.

GLENDA SLUGA is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. She specializes in the history of international relations and the history of gender and identity. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History is by David Armitage (Harvard University Press, 2007).