Thomas Jefferson's New Old World: the Development of “Europe”

Thomas Jefferson’s New Old World: The Development of “Europe” as a Political Concept in Jefferson’s Political Thought Armin Mattes Abstract This article argues that “Europe” as a political concept emerged to a significant degree not in Europe itself but in the United States, and more specifically in Thomas Jefferson’s writings of the Age of Revolution (and in those of some of his political allies, such as Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow). It did so in two ways. First, in the wake of the American Revolution, many Americans constructed a new “American” national identity in opposition to Europe. Consequently, “Europe” became re-conceptualized as the “Old World” antithesis to the United States. This “Old World” concept of Europe was, however, just as conceptually new as their imagined American “New World.” Second, following the outbreak of the French Revolution, Jeffersonian thinkers in particular hoped or even expected Europe to follow the American example and accordingly began envisioning “Eu- rope” as a democratic and federal European Union along U.S. lines. Keywords: Europe; Jefferson; Age of Revolution; New World-Old World; conceptual change Introduction As the “spatial turn” has gained ground in the Humanities and So- cial Sciences during the last three decades, so too have historians put a renewed focus on concepts of space and place (Gotthard; Döring and Thielmann). Unsurprisingly, the concept of “Europe,” as a notion deal- ing with a global macro-region, has garnered considerable attention in this context (Schenk, “Mental Maps: Die Konstruktion”; “Mental Maps: The Cognitive Mapping”). Approaching the concept with various Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.2 (2021): 401-21 401 Armin Mattes methodological tools, historians have illuminated its content, its his- torical evolution, and its contingent and contested nature. Examining the development of “Europe” as a political concept in Jeffersonian writings—mainly those of Thomas Jefferson himself but also those of some of his political allies, such as Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow—this essay adds to this literature by highlighting the contribution of American authors to the conceptual evolution of “Europe.” The concept of “Europe,” of course, is much older than the Age of Revolution. From its classical Greek roots and Charlemagne’s revivi- fication of the concept to its renewed usage as a secular alternative to “Christendom” in the late Middle Ages, “Europe” had already had a long history before the early modern period (Delanty 16-29; Gollwitzer 17-38; Schmale). Especially in the eighteenth century, however, both the usage and the meanings of the concept expanded. The major impetus for this development was European expansion into other parts of the world and in particular into the “New World” of the Americas. The encounter and increasing connection with non-European worlds promoted the search for a more precise definition of what exactly “Europe” was and what set it apart from other parts of the world, especially the American “New World” (Münkler 531-34). The result was a multitude of comparative ef- forts by naturalists such as the Comte de Buffon and the proliferation of myths such as the distinction between the “noble savage” and European (over-)refinement. In other words, for better or worse, the “New World and Old World were defined against each other” (P. Onuf 4) and it was in such comparative endeavors that “the idea of Europe was becoming more fully worked out, more tangible, more forceful” (Gerbi 31). A central aspect in “Europe’s” conceptual development was the ques- tion of its unique political organization. Among a host of interpreta- tions, two dominant strands of thought emerged in the eighteenth century. The first, building on the works of sixteenth-century jurists Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf and reaching a high point with Emerich de Vattel’s 1758 The Law of Nations, emphasized (and often developed) the law of nations. In this tradition, Europe was interpreted as a “republic” in the sense of the prevalence of the rule of law in intra-European relations. The second strand, especially prominent in the British sphere, stressed a balance of power philosophy. In this view, what characterized “Europe” was a conglomerate of religiously, economically, and culturally similar states whose political independence was guaranteed by an ever- shifting web of alliances. This system prevented any one power from becoming too powerful, thus preserving Europe’s peculiar political con- figuration (Gollwitzer 39-48; Münkler 534; Schmidt). A third early modern intellectual movement that was significant for the evolution of the concept of “Europe” was less concerned with de- scribing what Europe was than what it ought to be. Realizing that the law of nations and the balance of power were rather deficient in prevent- ing frequent outbreaks of war, several authors from the Duc de Sully to 402 Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 Thomas Jefferson’s New Old World the Abbé de Saint-Pierre and Jean-Jacques Rousseau put forth “peace plans” (Aksu 25-73). In varying forms, most of these plans called for the installation of a European Congress that could serve either as a Euro- pean parliament in regard to foreign relations or as a court of arbitration. However, virtually all of these plans addressed only the problem of how to prevent war in international relations. They did not advocate political changes within the respective countries, and such a European Congress would thus have been an assembly of sovereign monarchs. Only in the wake of the revolution in America, and even more so of that in France, did conceptions of “Europe” also evolve seriously in regard to the continent’s social constitution (Boer 1-2). The most famous essay linking the issues of peace and the democratization of society was probably the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace (Aksu 87-229). However, Kant’s proposition for a League of Nations between sovereign, democratized nations was inherently unlimited and therefore already looking beyond Europe. In contrast, many other writings on “Europe” by Europeans from the Age of Revolution—like most of the early modern peace plans—were little more than apologia for the hegemony of a particular country in Europe. Prominent examples were the writings of Comte d’Hauterive and the German professor Niklas Vogt, whose suggestions for the development of “Europe” promoted French expansionism and Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine (Gollwitzer 108-09, 115-16; Münkler 536). In contrast to these European writers, Americans during the Age of Revolution contributed to “Europe’s” conceptual development in two different ways. First, in the wake of the American Revolution, most Americans were more concerned with their own new republic than with Europe. Having achieved independence and created a federal republic, Americans were deeply anxious about their place in the world. The ma- jority of free White Americans tracing their ancestry to Europe, and American culture being an offshoot of Europe’s, Americans, in Daniel Kilbride’s words, “found it hard to resist the temptation to use Europe […] as a foil against which to create a new national identity” (6). Of the many Americans engaged in this project of identity construction in opposition to Europe, Thomas Jefferson was one of the most active and most influential. However, while Jefferson and other Americans envisioned their ideal of the new American nation in juxtaposition to Europe, they also, as an unintended but unavoidable by-product, created new concepts of “Europe” in the form of the “Old World.” Yet, conceptually their reinterpretation of the “Old World” was as new as their imagined “New World.” Second, and historiographically even more significantly, Americans were among the first to envision “Europe” as a federal and democratic union. The tendency to define “Europe” in contradistinction to the United States existed throughout the Age of Revolution. In contrast, the idea that Europe would follow the American model and become a Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 403 Armin Mattes federal, democratic union, which reached a high point in the early phase of the French Revolution, subsided considerably with Napoleon’s con- solidation of power. Moreover, while Americans of all political persua- sions took part, in one form or another, in defining Europe and America against each other, envisioning Europe as a student of the young United States was much more prevalent among ardent supporters of the French Revolution, meaning mostly members of the emerging Republican Par- ty. For these Jeffersonian Republicans, belief in the revolutionary trans- formation of Europe became a rallying point in distinction to the much more skeptical Federalists. Jefferson, as the Republican leader, again stood in the forefront of this development. Because some of his political allies, especially those who resided in Europe during the French Revo- lution, such as Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow, contributed to the development of the idea of “Europe” as a federal, democratic union in even more elaborate ways than Jefferson himself, their writings on the subject are included in this analysis. Europe as the Antithesis During much of the colonial period, it was not the settlers in Amer- ica who thought of the New World in terms of a polar opposite to the Old. On the contrary, while European colonists in America, especially in the early years, carefully preserved their ties to Europe out of sheer necessity, and over time saw their burgeoning societies as proud out- posts of European civilization, European intellectuals imagined the vast and still largely unknown North American continent as a contrast to Europe. This opposition of New and Old Worlds manifested itself in such myths as the “noble savage” or, as in the case of the French natural historian Comte de Buffon, in theories about the degeneration of species in the New World, a notion Jefferson and other Americans vehemently rejected (Woodward 1-15; Gerbi 3-7, 56-58).

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