[Gladstone]

Originally Posted by A Few Acres of Snow

Yes. I saw this federation of states, this national community made up of people who speak even less the same language than the Europeans and who are faced with problems of ethnicity far more weighty than those in Europe. And I think that miracles are possible, that the inorganic nation, the inorganic social body, can be constituted. I discover that constitutional patriotism, to speak with Habermas, is not just a philosophical reverie, that it's something that works. One can create an army, maintain schools, raise taxes, etc. When you cross the country as I did, when you see how a landowner in Alabama has nothing in common with a Mexican from San Diego or a European from Savannah or Charleston, and that despite all that America has been able to constitute itself, that rekindles your hope in Europe. -Bernard-Henri Levy

That is interesting. It's almost identical to what the London Times wrote in March 1848 after the many revolutions in Europe that year...italics in original.

"Let them [Europe] observe the working of federalism in America. The most complete national unity is there preserved as regards foreign nations; complete freedom of trade, complete uniformity of action in all respects essential to national life; while, at the same time, the inestimable habit of self government is created and retained, and the power of adapting local institutions to local wants exercised so fully, that no American citizen has to complain that the interests of his locality suffer by the distance or neglect of the legislative centre. The German in Pennsylvania, the Frenchmen in Louisiana, the Spaniard in Florida, had no need, when they came to participate in the advantages of the great American Union, of sacrificing one iota of the local institutions to which they were attached. So wonderfully elastic and expansive is this principle of government, that the entire American continent might, as it appears to us, be absorbed in one vast federation, with but little inconvenience or danger resulting from its extent and diversity of characteristics.

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