Are Americans Just a Bunch of Squatters?

A trans-Atlantic legal battle has broken out between the United States and the United Kingdom. The bone of contention is the 1776 Declaration of Independence.

“Just shut up!”

The squabble between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron at the Euro Conference last weekend again shows how the shadows of past rivalries can eclipse the present. What are a couple hundred years of history, anyway? As if it were just yesterday, the tradition-conscious British and French can still recall how it was when unruly settlers in the colonies dared to revolt — and were only able to keep the French army off their backs with the help of the British crown.

What happened after — the legendary American War of Independence (1776) — may be history, but it is history that lives. And it’s highly controversial on both sides of the Atlantic. It was an illegal act, the American Revolution; the insurgents’ declaration of separation from the British motherland was based on fraud and deception.

At least that’s how British prosecutors saw the matter when they participated in a recent historical congress of lawyers in Philadelphia to discuss the origins of the United States. “What would happen if, say, Texas decided to secede from the Union?” the revisionist faction asked. The British had, after all, merely asked for a tax adjustment from the colonies as payment for their seven-year defense against French attacks. The tensions thus resulting ended up being the cause of the colonies seceding from Great Britain and founding their own country.

So was Thomas Jefferson nothing but a rabble-rouser? Are the civilization-creating powers of America’s founding documents merely an expression of ingratitude and betrayal? In other words, “Just shut up?” Not at all. And we Germans are now going to take a closer look at the Potsdam Agreement. Were all the participants legally authorized to sign it?