By David Armitage Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, Harvard University
David Armitage explores the Declaration of Independence’s impact in world history as well as its significance within the United States, though for distinct and different reasons.
Weeks before his death on July 4th, 1826, Thomas Jefferson recalled the Declaration of Independence as “an instrument ... pregnant with our own and the fate of the world.” Fifty years’ hindsight had distilled the two-fold significance of the Declaration, in 1776 and afterwards, for the United States and for the world. On the one hand, the Declaration was the birth certificate of the United States of America, the first official document to use that name publicly and the first to speak in the “unanimous” voice of thirteen colonies that had declared themselves to be free and independent states. On the other hand, the Declaration was a diplomatic document, directed to the “Powers of the Earth” to secure their military and commercial support for the colonists’ cause against Great Britain. It assured the existing powers in Europe that, their revolt against Britain aside, the newly proclaimed United States would not disturb the existing international order but extend it, to accommodate the new set of states arising across the Atlantic.
In 1776, then, the Declaration of Independence was Janus-faced, at once trained on domestic concerns in North America and turned outwards to the wider world. In the two and a half centuries that followed, the Declaration’s influence spread around the world, though not always in line with its reputation within the United States. Most Americans have seen the Declaration as a charter of their individual rights to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” By contrast, most of those outside the U.S. have taken it to be a charter of their collective rights to form “one People,” to revolt against external authorities, to secede from empires, and ultimately to form independent states. The Declaration’s two faces are quite compatible: indeed, Jefferson and his co-authors wrote it so that each set of rights, individual and collective, would reinforce the other. Yet the Declaration’s global influence looks very different from its impact within the United States.
It is rare to see an entirely new political form emerge, but the Declaration of Independence was just such a novelty. There had been secessions and revolts before the 1770s, of course, and the drafters of the Declaration were well aware of European precedents like the Dutch Revolt of the early seventeenth century. (The United Provinces of the Netherlands were even occasionally termed “united states” in English.) But before July 1776, no single “People” had publicly and legally announced their desire for “the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them” with such a declaration. “Declarations” were well known legal forms from English law, where they meant what we might now call a charge-sheet. In fact, the bulk of the Declaration itself comprised its accusations against King George III. And such declarations were familiar from contemporary international law, where they were synonymous with manifestos issued by sovereigns, for example in the form of declarations of war. However, “independence” was a relatively novel political value in the 1770s, whether applied to peoples or to states: the historical prominence of independence in this sense is in large part the result of the Declaration’s global influence. A “declaration” of “independence” was at once traditional and avant-garde in 1776.
By the time the Continental Congress ratified and issued the Declaration in early July 1776, it had become imperative to issue a manifesto to justify the thirteen colonies’ rebellion against the British Parliament and King George III. The Declaration effectively declared war on the British state, as rebels within the British Empire transformed themselves into legitimate belligerents outside of it, turning a transatlantic civil war into a war between states. The colonists lacked material support from abroad, most importantly from France; they needed commercial and military alliances in the form of treaties with other powers; and external recognition was imperative to make legitimate treaties with other powers. For all these reasons, the Declaration was written in the language of the contemporary law of nations—Congress had the leading textbook of that law open before them as they drafted it—to ensure it would have the desired international impact while also securing internal unity.
The Declaration’s international influence began inauspiciously. The first copy of the document sent by ship to the French court was lost in transit. Other copies dispatched across the Atlantic were soon captured by British vessels: the largest single group of original printings of the Declaration outside the United States is in the British National Archives, where most have been preserved since they were taken in 1776. More informally, the Declaration travelled rapidly through the circuits of transatlantic media. By the fall of 1776, word of the Declaration and then translations of it, in whole or in part, had already spread to London, Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, the German lands, Scandinavia, and Southern and Eastern Europe.
It would take until February 1778 for the Declaration to have the desired diplomatic effect, when France offered a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the breakaway states. At that moment, the Declaration’s primary purpose had been achieved, as it showed that the former British colonies were now “FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES” and that, as such, they had “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do.” In this regard, the Declaration was primarily a declaration of inter-dependence with the other powers of the earth.
The United States was born international in 1776. (Or, rather they were born so: “United States” did not become a singular noun until after the trauma of the U.S. Civil War.) That message would be the one most later imitators of the Declaration would take from it. Since 1776, there have been hundreds of declarations of independence issued around the world, most ignored, but many successful in securing independence—that is, recognized statehood—for a people or nation breaking away from another authority. Over half of the states now represented at the United Nations have a foundational document they call a declaration of independence or something similar: in the Spanish-speaking world, they are “actas de independencia,” in the francophone world, “actes d’independence.” Some states, like Haïti (1803, twice) and Panama (1821; 1903), have declared independence more than once, especially those in the post-Soviet sphere—for example, Estonia (1918; 1991), Georgia (1918; 1991), and Latvia (1918; 1991). Such declarations could only achieve their goals with outside support: unilateral declarations of independence are not only illegal under international law, they are ineffectual, “the sound of one hand clapping,” in the words of a prominent international lawyer. And yet since 1945, no seceded state has secured international recognition without such a declaration. The Declaration showed later breakaway groups the vital importance of international recognition and the necessity of shaping the “Opinions of Mankind” to secure their cause.
In the first half-century or so after 1776, declarations of independence appeared from Vermont to Chile and from Haïti to Paraguay. Even before the Confederate States issued their declarations of independence from the United States in 1860-61, the form had spread beyond the Americas, with similar documents appearing in Greece (1822), Belgium (1830), New Zealand (1835), Liberia (1847), and Hungary (1848). Some took inspiration directly from the Declaration. For example, Venezuela’s representatives declared in 1811, “that these united Provinces are, and ought to be, from this day, by act and right, Free, Sovereign, and Independent States.” The Texas declaration of independence in 1836 also followed the American model in listing grievances and claiming freedom and independence, as would the Confederate secession proclamations. The Confederate declarations followed dozens that had failed in Spanish America, in West Florida, Puerto Rico, and across Central America. Some adopted the form of the U.S. Declaration to secure American support for their cause; most diverged from it as the genre of a declaration of independence took on a life of its own.
Declarations of independence clustered around the collapse of empires: the Spanish Monarchy in the early nineteenth century, the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov empires after World War I, and the European overseas empires during decolonization after World War II. (We might even say that the wave of declarations issued after the fall of the Soviet Union followed the same anti-imperial pattern.) Across the twentieth century, nationalists from Czechoslovakia to Korea claimed their sovereignty using the Declaration’s language. The authors of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948 likewise worked from a copy of the American original.
Few of these modern declarations borrowed the Declaration’s language of individual rights. A conspicuous exception was Hồ Chí Minh’s 1945 Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, written with the help of a C.I.A. operative. He opened it with the “immortal statement” from the 1776 Declaration: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Hồ updated and explained those words: “In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples of the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.” Later, in 1965, Southern Rhodesia adopted the shape of the 1776 Declaration, ironically ending their declaration with the royalist salutation, “God Save the Queen!” This was the last declaration directly influenced by the U.S. document, but it was not widely recognized because it did not express the will of the majority of the people, only the white minority government.
The past fifty years have seen declarations of independence from Kosovo to South Sudan, as well as independence movements from Catalonia to Greenland. The impulse towards independence has not gone away, but the direct influence of the U.S. Declaration has visibly declined, possibly in tandem with America’s contested role on the world stage. Seen from a distance of 250 years, the global influence of the Declaration looks rather different from its significance for Americans themselves.
Most people beyond the United States have viewed the Declaration as a charter for national independence or popular sovereignty as they have striven to organize themselves into “Free and Independent States.” Far fewer appealed to the individual promises of the Declaration’s second paragraph. Modern history shows that there is no necessary relationship between a state’s independence in conducting its own affairs and its respect for the freedoms and rights of individuals. We can firmly say that the Declaration was original, that its influence has been explosive, and that its influence in world history has been as great as its significance within the United States, though for distinct and different reasons. In 2026, more Americans than foreigners are likely to agree with the nineteenth-century Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth that the Declaration was “the noblest, happiest page in mankind’s history.”
David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies and former Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University.
