Make America a Continent Again
A modest proposal 🌎
Donald Trump is impressively good at what he does. By which I do not mean leading the government of the United States of America (by most accounts he was pretty terrible at it the first time around; for the second time, we’ll have to wait and see). I mean provoking people. Nobody can humanly avoid (over)reacting when he offhandedly makes some outrageous suggestion, like annexing Greenland or the Panama Canal or the whole of Canada. Or when he signed an executive order on his first day as the 47th president to rename (the northern part of) the Gulf of Mexico into “the Gulf of America.”
On the face of it, this seems like an insult to the nearby country of Mexico. But then I got thinking: to the Mexicans, the word América does not refer to the United States. It refers to the continent of America, which spans the entire Western hemisphere from Kaffeklubben Island near Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, and from westernmost Alaska to also Greenland (or the tip of Brazil if we decide islands don’t count). In Spanish, which is the most widely spoken language on the continent, the recommended usage1 is to avoid the plural las Américas. This is in stark contrast with the English norm of disambiguating “the Americas” from “America”, which almost always serves as the short name for the US of A.2
Thus one could imagine the Mexicans being okay with el Golfo de América. Especially considering that it is, after all, a rather central sea to the entire American continent:
This is, certainly, not the interpretation that President Trump had in mind. In fact I’d be willing to wager it didn’t even cross his mind that the word “America” might have more interpretations than just the USA.
Spend long enough online, though, and you’ll inevitably run into an argument over the meaning of that word between someone from the United States and someone from Latin America. Typically it goes like this (paraphrased from memory):
Person from the US: America is such a beautiful country!
Person from Brazil or Mexico or Quebec:3 You mean the *United States* is a beautiful country. America is a *continent*, there are like 670 million Americans who don’t live in the US
Person from the US: Sorry but you mean *the Americas*. Regardless of what you say in your language, in English, "America" with no further qualification always means the US. Everyone recognizes this. Please don’t be a pedant
Had my life gone only slightly differently, I could easily have been that pedant. But I made my peace with the US claiming the name “America” for itself. For one thing, it deserves it for becoming, in 1776, the first (and for 28 years,4 the only) country on the continent to achieve independence from a European colonial power. For another, it somehow managed to transform itself into not only the wealthiest and most populous country in either North or South America, but also the preeminent power on the entire planet, making the continent of America the metaphorical center of the world. These are incredible feats. The US leads America in all the relevant ways, and is a truly amazing place in many respects — so it’s totally valid for it to use the name. (Whereas it would be weird if, say, Paraguay or Honduras insisted on being referred to as “America.”)
But as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. For the better part of the last century, the United States has used its incredible wealth and power for good, stabilizing the world into a pax americana that has been handsomely profitable to itself and, among others, to its allies in the rest of the continent.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump now threatens this equilibrium. He talks of annexing Greenland, apparently upsetting the (allied) Danish government. He floats the idea of taking back the Panama Canal. He jokes (?) about using “economic force” to bully Canada into becoming the 51st state, and keeps saying he’ll apply punitive tariffs to it and to Mexico. These are not the actions of a stabilizing power for the Americas. Trump’s vision is isolationist, conflictual, zero-sum, possibly imperialist. I think it’s fair to say that if he persists in this direction, he loses the Mandate of Heaven. He no longer positions his country as a model for the other nations of the continent to follow.
And thus he loses the moral standing to claim the word “America” for the country he leads.
To be clear, a terminology change will not actually happen. The usage of “America” vs. “the Americas” is too entrenched in English usage. The people of the United States (I might call them United Statesians5) in particular will not stop referring to themselves as Americans, obviously. The people of Europe, who don’t care about any of this, will keep saying Amérique and Amerika and América (“an abusive use that occurs especially in Spain”) to refer to the United States.
But maybe I will make that my own tiny act of resistance. For the duration of Trump’s term or of his official stance on “the Gulf of America,”6 whichever is shorter, I will avoid calling his country America and his people Americans. All the non-US Americans are invited to join. Trump is right about one thing: the name “America” is beautiful, and if he wants it for the United States, then it’s up to him to make the United States a beautiful and inspiring place, a nation with enough self-confidence to remain humble, a place worthy of leading the Americas and the world — rather than the bombastic bully he seems intent on turning it into.
As the Real Academia Española’s “dictionary of doubts” says:
Debe evitarse la identificación del nombre de este continente con los Estados Unidos de América, uso abusivo que se da sobre todo en España.
i.e. using the name of the continent for the United States of America is “an abusive use that occurs especially in Spain” and “should be avoided.”
I think this is also true of Portuguese, the third-most spoken language on the continent. In the little French-speaking corner of the continent where I live, we likewise tend to avoid saying Amérique to refer to the US, but our French-speaking cousins in Europe do it all the time, so we often say les Amériques to disambiguate.
Fun question to ponder: is Quebec part of Latin America? We speak a Latin-based language, after all. Furthermore, the phrase “Latin America” was popularized by the French, namely the government of Napoleon III, to justify the French invasion of Mexico in the 1860s, and at the time it explicitly comprised all the French-speaking parts of the continent.
The second was Haiti in 1804.
Based on the Spanish word estadounidense and the uncommon French word états-unien. Yes, “United Statesian” is very ugly. That’s part of the punishment.
For what it’s worth, I suspect that the usage of “Gulf of Mexico” is also entrenched and the phrase “Gulf of America” will not catch on, but we shall see.
There's a similar thing about adjective Russian, which in English used to refer to the whole land of Russia, while in Russian language itself, there are two adjectives "russkiy" = "of Russian ethnicity / language" and "rossianin" - "of Russian Federation", which is a country that apparetly has many other ethnicities who when referred to as "ruski" might be offended. In English, however, they don't have a distinct adjective. I believe many misunderstandings of Russia from the "West" come from not drawing that distinction. So, I do very much support the usage of Unitedstatesian haha, at least with ironic connotation, which might be enough just to remind about the actual geography.
Also, remember that kids in the US learn that "Colombus discovered America." You would expect he put his feet on the US, but no; he never did it. He only reached Bahamas, Cuba etc. Historically, the Americas were one single continent: America. If America, otherwise, is the country, kids should stop learning that Colombus discovered America; it's fake news.