How to Talk About Americans

Or USAsians. United Statesians? Yankees? We/us/ours?

I write about and talk about international relations and the foreign policy of the United States, so I have to talk about Americans a lot. This raises a simple but profound question: what should I call the people and country that I study?

By now, I’m sure, most readers have encountered people who are adamantly opposed to referring to Americans as “Americans”. After all, the reasonable objection goes, if “America” is the term for the whole “New World”, why should we claim the term “American” to exclusively refer to people resident in or attached to the United States? More zealous pedants will insist that we use the entire phrase “United States of America”, since after all Mexico is also a “United States”—as are, it turns out, rather a lot of former countries, although the chance that the polity that most people know by that name will be confused for the “United States of Belgium” is rather low. (“Estados Unidos Mexicanos” is also, apparently, more properly translated as “United Mexican States”, which isn’t quite the same thing.)

I recognize this point of view but it goes too hard in a couple of ways. First, in English, we just don’t have a better collective demonym for U.S. persons. I wish that Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Usonian” had taken off but we are very far from that attaining any sort of currency beyond Wright-thinking people. Second, the term “American” is pretty deeply embedded in other U.S.-specific contexts: few if any would assume that a “Polish-American” is a person of Polish descent living in Peru. Third, in U.S.-accented English, we only infrequently refer to the collective peoples of the “New World” as “Americans”—my sense is that this was somewhat more common during the height of Pan-Americanism but that is now a dream as dead as Pan-Am and without the retro chic of the airline. If I were to talk about the “common American heritage of the United States and Brazil”, I suspect I’d confuse quite a lot of people, especially those who have heard about the Confederados (the Brazilian descendants of Confederates who left for Brazil after the Civil War).

There’s another reason I want to keep using “American”. It divorces the people from the government. The Oxford English Dictionary attests that the term “American” used to refer (in English) to someone in what’s now the United States antedates the independence of the thirteen colonies—it was current as early as 1648. I do think that there’s a cultural habitus and identity that marks someone as “American” that’s separate from the identity and implications that the U.S. state implies. In some interpretations, after all, the production of a common identity as “American” produced the conditions that led to the separation from Britain.

To be sure, common usage often conflates the government and the people, both referred to as “American”. But this is the result of historical developments, not a necessity. Indeed, the association of “American” identity with the political processes of the United States was a complex process that involved turning the abstractions of the Constitution into everyday practices, as Kathleen McNamara and I wrote in an article ironically published in Journal of Common Market Studies. That project has been largely successful—as Jacob Levy accurately observed, “No more than a handful of states [today] might have the kind of distinctiveness and popular loyalty as states that could actually generate a divided patriotism—perhaps Texas, Utah, Hawaii, and Louisiana”. In another universe, we might have seen “American” come to describe a variety of English-speaking North American countries, perhaps including Texas, a Pacific republic, and one or two others in addition to what Texians of the 1830s called “the United States of the North”.

I’m arguing backward into my deeper point here, which is that when I write or teach I don’t use the terms “American” or “United States”/“U.S.” interchangeably. I restrict usage of “United States” and its derivatives to references to the country and its federal government as a political actor. One consequence of this is that I no longer teach a course called American Foreign Policy—the class title was changed to be United States Foreign Policy. “America” doesn’t have a foreign policy—the United States does. The American government doesn’t act; the U.S. government does. And so on. But if I were talking about the society or culture or economy, or the character of a specific person, I’d turn to “American”.

This seems overly precise, but I do the same thing with, say, the government of the United Kingdom, institutions that are British, and the peoples that are English, Irish, and Scottish.¹ More to the point, in an academic setting, it’s important to separate different aspects of a concept and identify which ones are most appropriate at the time. In an academic setting that involves studying one’s own country and state, this precision is even more important.

For many decades, texts in my field of foreign policy habitually referred to “we” and “us” and “ours”. If the systematic study of U.S. foreign policy should adopt pronouns, they should be “it” and “their” and “theirs”. Identifying too strongly with the subject of an analysis leads to bias. Intentionally choosing terms and sticking with them helps discipline the mind and lead to better habits. When I analyze Washington’s decision-making, I’m not rooting for “our” team—I’m trying to understand what the United States is doing. Distance provides perspective. That’s something that I try to convey to students as well, and students will have this marked on their papers if they routinely talk about “our” foreign policy.

So those are the rules, such as they are:

1. The demonym is “American”.

2. The country and government is “the United States” (adjectival: U.S.)

3. It’s not “ours”.

1. Due to a longstanding policy having to do with obscure linguistic loyalties, I don’t recognize P-Celtic nationalisms.