The Union of Utrecht and the Articles of Confederation, the Batavian Constitution and the American Constitution: A Double Parallel

Abstract

In this essay in comparative history, I do not attempt to tell very much that is new to Americans about their own history or to Dutchmen about theirs;** I want rather to sharpen perception of these two national experiences by setting them against each other, in order to see how alike they were in some ways and how different in others. More specifically, I shall compare the constitutional development of the two countries, the Dutch under the Union of Utrecht adopted in 1579 and under the Batavian Republic which replaced it in 1795; and the American under the Articles of Confederation adopted in 1781 and under the Constitution which replaced it in 1789, which is still in force. The particular problems to which I will pay attention are not so much those of republicanism as such — by which I mean government without the sovereignty, real or formal, of a crowned head — as of federalism. One of these is the locus of identity, whether at the center or in the provinces or states; another is the process of decision-making under conditions of territorially distributed power; and last is the relation of external and internal factors, in order to put the question whether Ranke’s principle of the primacy of foreign policy holds good in these two cases.

Published originally in Herrschaftsverträge, Wahlkapitulationen, Fundamentalgesetze, ed. R. Vierhaus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977). Reprinted with permission. ** It is for this reason that I do not underpin this paper with an apparatus of footnotes and references. The information is well-known, and the analysis and interpretation are my own.