As we prepare for our nation’s 240th birthday, we face a world seemingly more divided than ever.
We face one of the most contentious presidential elections in our history with two major candidates who faced major internecine opposition before their respective nominations and widespread distrust from both members of their own parties and the electorate as a whole.
On the other side of the pond Great Britain narrowly voted last week to leave the European Union, an economic and political body of which it has been a principal member since joining in 1973. The EU is the offspring of the United States’ Marshall Plan, an economic reconstruction effort to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. As European economies integrated after 1945, so too did their political alliances, and it seemed like the EU was slowly moving toward a U.S.-style federation of heterogeneous states sharing common laws but with regional diversity.
The division in Britain has renewed calls for secession in Scotland. Scottish nationalists narrowly voted to remain in Britain two years ago in part because of EU membership. Scots voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU last week, but were outvoted by the Welsh and English.
Due to the “Brexit,” Northern Ireland is also considering secession from Britain with one of the factions suggesting union with Ireland to stay in the EU and another opting for independence.
Scottish and Northern Irish secession from the United States’ colonies’ home nation would be the equivalent of our parents getting a divorce well into our adulthood. There is a peculiar irony is seeing our mother country on the verge of dismemberment so near the anniversary of our own country’s birth. The independent states on European continent, which have been moving toward a unified state, all question the purpose and means of their experiment with nationalists in a host of countries citing Brexit as a reason to break away.
The United States was forged between an agricultural South and an industrialized North, coastal cities and an inland frontier. The Founding Fathers did not expect our United States to survive more than a generation or two, but built an architecture for us to shape a nation that might endure.
Enfranchisement grew from white, male property owners to include freedmen, former indentured servants, former slaves, women and indigenous American Indians, all with different voices, but sharing an ideal of liberty. Our government was shaped to be the product of vigorous debate and compromise for the betterment of all.
Europe already suffered centuries of conflict and major continental wars, but even such a crucible seemingly cannot unite the Old World in the same way the American Revolution and the American Civil War united our nation into one.
If the European Union does not endure, if Great Britain ceases to be, Americans should not doubt how our melting pot of cultures, languages, faiths, customs and creeds forms a diverse nation, which still endures because of our belief that we are stronger people united as one.
