| Summary: | "The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which US foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper M. Trautsch argues that, for a sense of national self to emerge, the US needed to be disentangled from its most important European reference points: Great Britain and France. As he shows, foreign-policy makers could therefore promote American nationalism by provoking foreign crises and wars with these countries, hereby creating external threats that would bind the fragile union together. By reconstructing how foreign policy was thus used as a nation-building instrument, Trautsch provides an answer to the puzzling question of how Americans--lacking a shared history and culture of their own and justifying their claim for independent nationhood by appeals to universal rights--could develop a sense of particularity after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War"--
"On July 1, 1776, John Dickinson--a member of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Continental Congress--explained to the assembled convention why he was opposed to a declaration of independence. "To escape from the protection we have in British rule by declaring independence would be like Destroying a House before We have got another, In Winter, with a small Family," he told his colleagues. Before seeking separation from the mother country, "We should know on what Grounds We are to stand with Regard to one another," he suggested but found that "Some of Us totally despair of any reasonable Terms of Confederation." Dickinson therefore came to the conclusion that "PARTITION of these Colonies will take place if Great Britain cant conquer Us." Not only did the revolutionaries take the risk that they might lose the War of Independence against Great Britain; they also had to expect the union to fall apart if they were indeed successful, so Dickinson's argument went. Since no American collective sense of self had yet developed, their attachment to Great Britain was all that tied colonists to each other. Once they severed the connection to the mother country, Americans, not yet having developed a national identity, would lack the foundation for maintaining their union"--
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