The Relationship between National Exceptionalism and the Transnational Perspective

Caleb McDaniel

According to numerous news reports, the recent election of Barack Obama as President of the United States of America resulted in jubilation far beyond the streets of Chicago and the borders of the United States. From Obama’s childhood school in Indonesia to his father’s home country of Kenya to the capitals of Europe, numerous observers effused that Obama’s election represented a historic event not just in the history of the United States, but in the history of the world. The British Guardian concluded that Obama was “America's hope and, in no small way, ours too.” The sentiment from across the political spectrum in France was well captured by the Socialist Jack Lang: “The America that we love is back.” A Russian student greeted Obama’s post-election speech with the statement that “the U.S., that is country that is really majestic. ... I feel it is a country where everything is possible.”A Venezuelan employee of a cell phone company agreed: “It’s kind of nice to feel good about the United States again.”

Of course, not all of the reactions to Obama’s election outside of the United States were so glowing, and the attention given by American newspapers to the most “Americophilic” reactions may say as much about the way Americans wish to see themselves as about the way they are seen abroad. Yet these reactions to Obama’s election provide a timely reminder that the idea of America still serves, and has long served, as a palimpsest for both the hopes and fears of many people who are not American citizens. What historians Charles Bright and Michael Geyer call the “deterritorialization of civil society” in the modern era has helped shape a variety of “offshore Americas”--projected images of what the United States represents--whose boundaries and meanings are not articulated within the United States alone or entirely under the control of Americans themselves or the sovereignty of the American nation-state. American exceptionalism--the idea that, because of the unique conditions under which the history of the United States has unfolded, “America’s hope” is also the world’s--is not an idea “made in the U.S.A” alone.

As a result, even “American exceptionalism” should be a subject for “transnational history”--historical scholarship that focuses less on the history of the nation-state, and more on the circulation of people, goods, and ideas across national borders. The idea of America--both for Americans and non-Americans--has been shaped by cross-border flows of information, discourse, and migration. The way Americans are perceived abroad, whether for good or for ill, shapes the way Americans perceive themselves--and vice versa--so that even “American exceptionalism” has a history that cannot be told within the confines of national history. At least, that is the point I want to make, allusively and speculatively, in this brief essay.

The manifestoes for “transnational history” that have been published in the last couple of decades by American historians have seldom made the point I want to make here, partly because the particular professional and political impulses that have motivated calls for “transnational history” have resulted in the stigmatization of “American exceptionalism” as the sworn enemy of transnational historians. Indeed, many self-described “transnational historians” have seen their task as one not of explaining, but of vanquishing “exceptionalism”--the idea that the United States has been a unique case in world history, unaffected by the historical forces that have shaped other nations and superior because of its uniqueness. These ideas can be undermined, according to transnational historians, by demonstrating that the history of the United States has been, to cite several of the mixed metaphors that appear in manifestoes for the field, “embedded” or “entangled” or “crisscrossed” in or with other national histories.

  Ironically, however, by casting “American exceptionalism” in a purely adversarial role, manifestoes for transnational history risk leaving unchallenged the traditional story about how “American exceptionalism”--the idea itself--came to be. The usual glosses on the term imply that “American exceptionalism” was conceived in the Puritan dream of America as a “city on a hill,” consolidated by nationalist historians and politicians in the Founding Era, cultivated by expansionists who believed in “Manifest Destiny” before the American Civil War, and reasserted by both liberal consensus historians and Cold War politicians in the twentieth century. Yet this abbreviated genealogy of American exceptionalism is one that looks for the ancestors of “American exceptionalism” exclusively within the American past. It sees the powerful ideas, symbols, and rhetorical invocations of American exceptionalism as a tradition invented through Americans’ own dialogue with their forbears and their national history.

To embrace fully the project of transnational history will require, however, that historians treat national exceptionalist myths themselves as the products of complex confrontations, crossings, and conversations across national borders as well as within them. We need not only transnational historians against exceptionalism--we need transnational histories of exceptionalism, histories that will examine the interaction between the images of America produced and consumed within the United States itself and the “offshore America” that has always been imagined by outside observers.

What these narratives would reveal, first of all, is that the image of America as a unique case in world history has not been forged by Americans alone. Many offshore observers also claimed that the United States was a unique republican experiment.  To point only to Europe, from Thomas Paine onwards, numerous reformers, nationalists, and political radicals lauded America as an example for their own countries to follow. In my own period of specialization--the mid-nineteenth-century--the image of America as a beacon of democracy received frequent airing in the writings of European liberals and radical reformers, who deployed exceptionalist scripts about the United States to shame political opponents in their own countries. Supporters of universal manhood suffrage in England like the working-class Chartists pointed to the prosperity of the United States as evidence that extended voting rights could close the deep cleavages in English society.  European land reformers pointed to the availability of land in the United States as a secret to its national success.  European free traders celebrated the dynamism of the American economy. After touring the United States between 1818 and 1820, Scottish radical and feminist Frances Wright concluded that the “American nation” was so blessed by its free institutions that “the liberties of mankind are entrusted to their guardianship.”  “No nation, in the whole history the known world” had begun its career so free of the “evils” that plagued Europe, Wright proclaimed, adding that Americans were “singularly enlightened in the art of government.”  Upon the success of their federal “experiment,” she wrote, the liberties not just of a nation, but “perhaps of a world,” depended.

Nineteenth-century Americans themselves often saw such compliments simply as measures of the influence of the United States abroad--just as many Americans likely interpret global reactions to Obama’s election as evidence of America’s influence on the imagination of non-Americans. Yet transnational histories of exceptionalism would unsettle this unilateral image of America’s “influence” on the world by showing how the images of non-Americans about America--what Bright and Geyer call “offshore America”--have both challenged, buttressed, and elicited reaction from “onshore” American exceptionalists. American exceptionalism cannot even account for its own history without paying attention to historical connections and exchanges that stretch across national and territorial borders. The American nation-state is too small a historical container even for the history of the idea of the nation-state as a unique container.

It is worth remembering, in this vein, that even John Winthrop’s famous sermon designating the Puritans’ New England settlement as a “city on a hill”--the Ur-text that has served generations of American exceptionalists as a founding myth for the nation--was not even delivered within the territorial boundaries of what would become the United States. Winthrop spoke of his American settlement as a “city on a hill,” according to the traditional story, while still floating with his congregants in a ship on the Atlantic Ocean, and Winthrop’s biographer Francis J. Bremer has suggested that the sermon may even have been delivered in England before the departure of the fleet. From the beginning, then, the tropes of American exceptionalism cannot located within the enclosure of the American nation-state or even within the enclosure of the North American continent. Likewise, even when the image of America as a “city on a hill” was revived by Ronald Reagan in the Cold War era, it was invoked only to be inserted in transnational debates, within an increasingly deterritorialized civil society that overspilled the boundaries and outran the control of the American nation-state, about democracy and American power abroad. It has been through crossings, circulation, movement, and transnational exchange that even American exceptionalism has been made.

W. Caleb McDaniel is assistant professor of history at Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA. He received his Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University in 2006 and is currently revising his dissertation, "Our Country is the World: American Abolitionists Abroad," into a book manuscript on the abolitionists' participation in transatlantic liberal networks in the mid-nineteenth-century. A portion of this project recently appeared as "Repealing Unions: American Abolitionists, Irish Repeal, and the Origins of Garrisonian Disunionism," _Journal of the Early Republic_ 28, no. 2 (2008), 243-269. He has previously blogged about transnational history and other subjects at Mode for Caleb, http://modeforcaleb.blogspot.com

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