The ideas behind 'the consent of the governed'
The Flemish roots of the Declaration of Independence, and why that is important to know
Here is an article that will interest my American and Flemish/Dutch readers. A dive into the US Constitution, from a historical perspective, which will provide new insight that has still relevance today, and will offer a solid foundation for any thinking on authority and leadership in general.
This is an article I loved writing, as it allows me to feel patriotic not just about my new home country, the United States, but also about where I was born and raised, my native Flanders.
Everyone knows the meaning of the 4th of July. Independence Day! The day a few brave men stood up against the British king and might, and declared the American Colonies to be independent from English rule.
But most won’t know that about 3 weeks later, on July 26th, but back in 1581, the ‘Plakkaat van Verlatinghe’ was signed and published. In English, the Act of Abjuration. This article will show how the US Declaration, and the American People, owe a debt of gratitude to the Flemish people for the groundwork they laid, all those centuries back, and even earlier, almost a millennium ago.
As a little aside: the Flemish and the Dutch are closely related people, with a shared history and culture, even as political leadership has varied and switched hands countless times over the last 1000 years. For ease of reference, compare it to the relation between Americans and Canadians. There are differences, too. One of them is that the Dutch are excellent salespeople, and not particularly afraid to praise their own qualities, real or perceived. The Flemish, on the other hand, are much more introverted, and dislike the spotlight.
Which is why Heineken is known and sold all over the world for decades now, where Belgian beers until recently remained largely unknown. Even Stella Artois, as a lager superior to Heineken, did not really get their international boost until the company that owned the Stella Brewery, Interbrew, merged with the Brazilian company AmBev in 2004. Under Brazilian leadership (Carlos Brito and Marcel Herrmann Telles), they acquired Anheuser-Bush in 2008, and made Stella one of their flagship beers.
Brazilians did that, not Belgians, even if Stella is the better beer. And the Dutch are the better salesmen.
It is exactly that lack of self-promotion that leads the Flemish to fail to claim credit for having provided a significant portion of the groundwork for the Declaration of Independence. How and what that influence was, is what we will explore here. (Based directly on research by my friend, David Baekeland)
History credits Thomas Jefferson as the brilliant creator of the American Declaration of Independence. Of course, he didn’t do that alone, but with a team of editors, including men of great stature and skills, such as the likes of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and with significant input from the Continental Congress. Still, the draft was written up by Jefferson, and he provided the overall framework.
Jefferson himself wrote about the Declaration:
“Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.” (Correspondence to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825)
With all those hands and eyes on it, the Declaration was intended to draw on precedents that were known by their contemporaries. The goal was, after all, to provide a convincing legal rationale for their secession!
And of course, the sources Jefferson drew from do include authors such as John Locke or documents such as the indictment of Charles I. Yet he also had numerous books on Dutch and Flemish history, to which he referred in his correspondence, and as we know from the list of works from his library in his home of Monticello.
There is debate on the inspiration of the Declaration, with people such as Maier and Armitage dismissing any Dutch (at that time more or less synonymous with Flemish, at least culturally) influence. Pauline Maier is a distinguished Professor of American History in Massachusetts (UofM, later MIT), but was, in her work, for example, intent to show that Jefferson was ‘overrated’.
David Armitage is Professor of History at the British Harvard University, co-author of The History Manifesto, where he argues for social engagement of historians, specifically towards the elites: business leaders, policy makers, activists.
But another American academic, Stephen E. Lucas, strongly disagrees. I side with him. Prof. Lucas is Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and provides a linguistic analysis, not a mainly historical one (which is too prone to pollical bias, as both prior examples show), but as an expert on historical rhetoric. He studied the primary source of the words, phrases and ideas that make up the Declaration of Independence, and came to the conclusion that it overwhelmingly draws from the Dutch Plakkaat.
"Of all the models available to Jefferson and the Continental Congress, none provided as precise a template for the Declaration as did the Plakkaat. When you look at the two documents side by side, you cannot avoid noticing that the American Declaration more closely resembles its Dutch predecessor than any other possible model."
This is supported by a Dutch professor of History, J.P.A. Coopmans, who points at the unmistakable similarities.
What is this Plakkaat? In the 1500, the religious revolt, started by the iconoclasts, quickly became political as well. But where Emperor Charles V, Flemish born, was liked by the people in Flanders, his son, Philip II, ruled from Spain, and knew neither the language nor the traditions and customs of the Low Countries. As such, he had no idea that in Flanders, the relation between ruler and subject was very strongly based on mutual contracts.
When confronted with this uprising, he reacted with strong force, scattering the rich part of the population all over Europe (and this laid the foundation for the Dutch Golden Age in the 1600s). This response led to the 80 Years war, a revolt of the 17 provinces that make up the Low Countries (present day Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg). Interestingly, Jefferson referred to the 80 Years War as the ‘Flemish War’ in his own correspondence!
In 1581, an assembly, the Staaten Generaal, not unlike the Continental Congress, issued the ‘Plakkaat of Verlatinghe. In it, they list their grievances, and then their resolution: shattering the ties with the old ruler, based on his breach of his responsibilities towards them.
This is the exact model the Declaration followed, and contemporaries notices immediately the connection (which is a very strong argument supporting Coopmans and Lucas against Maier and Armitage).
The most remarkable such example, is when the Dutch Stadtholder, William V, Prince of Orange, wrote to registrar Fagel, on August 20, 1776 (after reading a copy of the Declaration of Independence) that he was “indignant” and considered it a “parody of the document that our forefathers issued against King Philip the Second” in 1581.
William V, Prince of Orange
The Prince of Orange noted the following similarities between the Plakkaat and the Declaration:
-they both start by presenting a lengthy catalog of grievances against the sovereign.
- they both mention repeated attempts made by the aggrieved to seek redress through official and unofficial channels.
- they both conclude that having been repeatedly rebuffed by tyrannical rulers, they have no other option but to officially sever the ties that bind them.
Now this Plakkaat was authored by a committee of 4 men, of which 2 certainly, and 1 likely, was Flemish (from the Southern Provincies), and not Dutch (from the Northern Provinces that later would gain their independence from Spain and Philips II).
In it, they deposed their ruler, Philips II, for having violated the Social Contract between him and his subjects. It was precisely this idea that resonated with Jefferson, and that made its way into American thinking. A society based on freedom, but governed by the rule of law, where all were thus equal. Not necessarily equal as in ‘the same/identical in state’, but as in ‘having the same rights and the same responsibilities’.
But here is why it is important to stress the Flemish contribution to the Plakkaat. These Flemish authors of the Plakkaat, in turn, drew on their own past, the way her medieval cities had developed their understanding of their identity and freedoms. So to my Dutch Brethren, I am not trying to steal the Plakkaat, or minimize your role in that uprising against the Spanish. I am trying to place the Declaration in a wider historical context, that runs, through the Plakkaat, straight back to the Flemish free towns of Ghent, Ypres, Bruges,… In the textbook Introduction to Belgian Law by Hubert Bocken & Walter de Bondt (Kluwer 2000), a chapter is devoted to “Belgium’s contribution to Law”.
“The idea of the rule of law was already present in Flemish cities in the twelfth century….When count William Clito came to power in Flanders in 1127, he guaranteed the inhabitants of his cities a right judgement of the cities’ aldermen against every man and against himself [the count]. The prince is already [at this time] subject to the laws. The 1127 city charters were not mere words. On 16 February 1128, Ivan, Lord of Aalst, acted as the spokesman of the city of Ghent before the count. Ivan rebuked the court for not respecting the privileges he had given the burghers of Ghent and other cities. To settle the matter, he proposed [that] a special court should convene, in which the Peers of Flanders and representatives of the clergy and the people would sit to judge over the count. If this court should find the count unworthy of the countship, he would have to give it up. The count did not agree to this and Ivan and Ghent rose in revolt.
William was killed in the civil war that ensued and a new count came to power. The background of the conflict was the opinion of Ghent and other cities that there was a contractual relationship between the count and the citizens. They recognized him as their lord and he, in turn, recognized their privileges. If the count no longer respected his part of the deal by acting against the rights of citizens, they had a right to break their contract and to fight him.
This contractual conception of the relationship between ruler and subjects returns in the city charters granted by William’s successor. Thereafter the counts managed to suppress it, but it reappeared at regular times in Flemish history. In 1191 the first article of a charter for the city of Ghent stated that the citizens were only subject to the count as long as he wanted to treat them justly and reasonably…
This social contract bound not only Gent to the Count of Flanders but other Flemish cities with similar explicit conditions. It was this sense of a ‘broken social contract’ that led the Flemish weavers and butchers to gather on the ‘groeneveld’ outside the walls of the city of Kortrijk on July 11, 1302.”
Likewise, “The 1581 Act of Abjuration is reminiscent of Ivan of Aalst. By his failure to respect the rights of his subjects, Philip II of Spain had lost his right to rule the Netherlands.”
So here we see a direct line, where Jefferson, confronted with the heavy and distant rule by a British monarch seeks –and finds- inspiration in the Plakkaat, where the Flemish and Dutch pointed out how their own monarch had broken the social contract in place, and declared themselves free. In turn, this Plakkaat drew from the earlier Flemish system of the mutual social contract, with the strongly developed sense of the rights of the citizens. The right to rule, given by God, was recognized, but linked to the responsibility of the ruler towards his subjects.
And this is the foundation of those brilliant American documents, pointing to God-given rights (which places them outside of human power to change or retract!), while building an equal society under the justice of the law. Equality, then, where both the ruler and the citizen were subject to the same rights and responsibilities, under the law. Here, the ruler was made temporary, and elected in a special way, again to protect all involved, instead of a more permanent monarch, but that is a whole different topic.
Understanding this foundational idea, will allow to see how it influenced American thought on rights, on authority, on the rule of law, on equality –under God- for all, and offers a window into our relationship with our leaders. This is a social contract, that should not be broken. Not by us, by storming and destroying/burning buildings, nor by our leaders, by failing to protect us from such destruction (among other failures).
We need to be aware of this social contract, both to understand our own role and responsibility, and to understand the role and responsibilities of our leaders. Which means that we should understand that removing them, when they break their part, is our responsibility. We cannot be lax in this, either, but need to become more actively involved in this grand social contract. First exhausting all official and non-official avenues at our disposal. Today: by voting, by volunteering, by contacting our officials, by serving on school boards, by not letting fear silence us anymore, and so on.
Knowing that we have a social contract, and where it came from, is a great start. Having seen how our rights were trampled in the last elections, we got a strong and loud wake up call, pointing at the gradual erosion in this contract. Time to reset the contract, and to start participating more fully in it.
What a grand Nation this is!
All is well.
Are you on Truth yet?
Another stellar bit of history! Thanks!