英美合并会是什么样子?（二）

Becca Royal-Gordon
What would happen if the UK joined the United States as a new state?
Let us suppose that a 51st state, the British Isles, were admitted to the unx. (I’ll explain the name change in a moment. And yes, calling it “British Isles” would not be accurate because it wouldn’t include the Republic of Ireland, but Baja California didn’t stop us from calling my state “California”, either.)

如果英国作为一个新州加入美国，会发生什么？
让我们假设第51个州不列颠群岛被接纳为联邦。（我稍后会解释更名的原因。是的，称其为“不列颠岛”是不准确的，因为它没包括爱尔兰共和国，但下加利福尼亚州也没有阻止我们称我所在的州为“加利福尼亚”。）

Demographics
To begin with, here’s a statement that will put things in proportion: In the newly enlarged United States, 16% of the population would be in the British Isles. Its population would be slightly smaller than the entire Midwest combined. There is no current state that’s as large as the British Isles would be—California is a little more than half its size. London would be neck-and-neck with New York for the title of America’s largest city (they both had populations of around 8.4 million about five years ago).
The UK could instead be split up, with the four constituent countries becoming four separate states, but because it contains 82% of the UK’s population, England would still be the largest US state, comparable to the entire Northeast. Scotland would be about the size of Colorado; Wales would be similar to Iowa; and Northern Ireland comparable to West Virginia. However, I don’t think splitting the UK in this fashion would make much sense;

人口统计学
首先，这里有一个按比例排列的声明：在新扩大的美国，16%的人口将在不列颠群岛。它的人口将比整个中西部的总和略少。目前没有哪个州能像不列颠群岛那样大——加利福尼亚州的面积只有它的一半多一点。伦敦将与纽约并驾齐驱，成为美国最大城市（大约五年前，伦敦和纽约的人口都在840万左右）。
英国可能会分裂，四个组成国变成四个独立的州，但由于其人口占英国人口的82%，英格兰仍然是美国最大的州，与整个东北部相当。苏格兰的面积大约相当于科罗拉多州；威尔士将类似于爱荷华州；北爱尔兰与西弗吉尼亚州相当。然而，我认为以这种方式分裂英国没有多大意义；

Constitutional Law
The Constitution of the United States most likely could not be amended to accommodate British demands. Even whatever treaty the US and UK made to create the unx would not be able to do so. Treaties cannot change the Constitution; only an amendment passed and ratified under Article Five can do that. The amendment process requires the approval of three-quarters of the states, so even after the British Isles were admitted, they would only add one vote (or four votes) to the “yes” column, against the fifty votes that already existed.
Parliament, on the other hand, can essentially remodel British constitutional law as they wish, because there is no difficult amendment process in the UK. I suspect Britain would have to adapt to the American legal system, not the other way around—American law is simply not flexible enough to allow it.
That means the UK would have to accept the US Constitution as they found it. The most obvious implications here are in the Bill of Rights: Brits would gain a Second Amendment right to bear arms that would severely limit the UK’s gun control, a First Amendment right to free expression that would blunt their hate speech laws and curtail their overbroad libel laws, a First Amendment right to freedom of religion that would disestablish the Church of England, and a Fifth Amendment right to just compensation that might limit the left wing’s ability to nationalize (state-ize?) private businesses.

宪法
美国宪法很可能无法修改以适应英国的要求。即使是美国和英国为建立联盟而签订的任何条约都无法做到这一点。条约不能改变宪法；只有根据第五条通过并批准的修正案才能做到这一点。修正程序需要获得四分之三的州的批准，因此即使在不列颠群岛被接纳后，他们也只会在“赞成”一栏增加一票（或四票），而不是已经存在的50票。
另一方面，议会基本上可以随心所欲地修改英国宪法，因为修改英国宪法并不困难。我怀疑英国必须要适应美国的法律体系，而不是相反——美国法律根本不够灵活，不允许这样做。
这意味着英国必须接受美国宪法。最明显的影响是在《权利法案》中：英国人将获得第二修正案中携带武器的权利，这将严重限制英国的枪支管制，第一修正案的宗教自由权将废除英国国教，第五修正案的公正补偿权可能会限制左翼将私营企业国有化的能力。

But perhaps the most shocking implication would be found in Article Four:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this unx a Republican Form of Government…
In other words, the royal family would have to go. They could still live there, of course, and they could still own palaces and fortresses and crowns and whatnot, but they would have to be private citizens with no special power in the government. Hence why I’m calling this state “British Isles”, not “United Kingdom”: It would no longer be a kingdom.
(To Americans, of course, this would represent the final, complete triumph of the Founding Fathers’ revolution over George III’s monarchy. But the Brits would not see it in terms nearly as romantic as that.)
Interestingly, the United States’s flexible federalist system would probably mean that three things would not have to go:
The parliamentary system. The Constitution is not actually that picky about how state governments should be structured: It merely requires that they must be republics, they must not deny the vote based on race, gender, or age above 18, and any legislative districts must contain approximately the same number of people. It does not require that they have fixed terms, separate branches, or any of the other common features of a state government. It does not even technically require a written constitution, although Congress has traditionally required one be written and submitted to them for approval before admitting a state. That means Parliament could come in nearly intact.

但也许最令人震惊的影响可能会出现在第四修正案：
美国应保证本联邦的每个州都实行共和政体
换言之，王室成员必须离开。当然，他们仍然可以住在那里，他们仍然可以拥有宫殿、堡垒和王冠等等，但他们必定是成为政府中没有特殊权力的普通公民。因此，我称这个州为“不列颠群岛”，而不是“联合王国”：它将不再是一个王国。
（当然，对美国人来说，这将代表着开国元勋们对乔治三世君主政体的彻底胜利。但英国人不会这么浪漫地看待这件事）
有趣的是，美国灵活的联邦制可能意味着有三件事不必放弃：
议会制度，事实上，宪法对州政府的结构并没有那么挑剔：它只是要求州政府必须是共和国，他们不得因种族、性别或年龄超过18岁为由而拒绝投票，任何立法区的人数都必须大致相同。它不要求他们有固定的任期，独立的分支机构，或州政府的任何其他共同特征。严格意义来说，它甚至不需要一部成文宪法，尽管国会传统上要求在承认一个州之前，必须起草一部成文宪法并提交国会批准。这意味着议会可能几乎完好无损。

The English common law. Federal and English common law diverged after the Revolution, but there is absolutely no reason the British Isles could not take English common law as their state law. Louisiana’s state law, for instance, is not even a form of common law at all, but a form of French civil law. Of course, in federal matters, US federal law would still apply within the British Isles.
The National Health Service. It is not illegal for a US state to have a single-payer health care system; in fact, Vermont was planning to set up a single-payer system under Obamacare. They changed course because the taxes were too high, but the British Isles would be quite used to paying the taxes necessary for single-payer health care. Of course, the NHS would not extend outside the British Isles, but it could pay the medical bills of British citizens visiting other states.
Finally, although Kelly Martin asserts that Britons born before admittance would not be eligible to be president, that’s actually an open question. It’s not clear if people born in a country which later became part of the United States thereby become natural-born citizens. The caselaw here is extremely thin, and it’s pretty likely that the Supreme Court would end up deciding it was a political question, meaning it was up to Congress to decide exactly what “natural-born citizen” actually meant.

英国普通法。联邦法和英国普通法在独立战争后出现了分歧，但不列颠群岛绝对没有理由不采用英国普通法作为自己的州法。例如，它甚至根本不是普通法的一种形式，而是法国民法的一种形式。当然，在联邦事务方面，美国联邦法律仍将适用于在不列颠群岛。
英国医疗服务制度。美国一个州拥有单一付款人的医疗保健系统并不违法；事实上，佛蒙特州正计划在奥巴马医改下建立一个单一付款人制度。他们改变了路线，因为税收太高了，但不列颠群岛会很习惯为单一付款人的医疗保健支付必要的税收。当然， 英国医疗服务制度不会扩展到不列颠群岛以外，但它可以支付英国公民到其他国家旅游的医疗费用。
最后，尽管凯利·马丁断言，在进入美国之前出生的英国人没有资格成为总统，但这实际上是一个悬而未决的问题。目前尚不清楚出生在一个后来成为美国一部分的国家的人是否因此成为“本国出生的公民”。这方面的判例法极为缺乏说服力，最高法院很可能最终会认定这是一个政治问题，这意味着“本国出生的公民”的确切含义应由国会决定。

Politics
This would be a huge mess all around.
The most important thing to understand here is that nearly the entire political spectrum in the UK is shifted left relative to the US’s. (From a European perspective, you would probably instead say the US’s is shifted right relative to the norm.) Thus, the UK’s conservative party (the Conservatives) is actually comparable to the US’s liberal party (the Democrats). The UK’s liberal party, Labour, is far enough left ;
That means the immediate effect would be that both the UK’s left and the US’s right would be disempowered by the insertion of the UK into US politics. US Republicans would probably reach for their guns, while UK Labourites would mobilize workers to create paralyzing strikes.
However, the long-term effects are much harder to predict. we might expect that the Democrats and Conservatives would work together. But political parties are ultimately coalitions of interest groups who happen to find common ground in certain areas, and the Democratic coalition is quite different from the Conservative coalition.
Ultimately, I imagine the process of combining the two party systems as rather like two galaxies colliding:
The two political systems would eventually coalesce into a coherent whole, but the process would be chaotic and disruptive, with little of the original structure surviving.

政治
这将是一场巨大的混乱局势
这里需要理解的最重要的一点是，与美国相比，英国几乎整个政治领域都存在左倾。（从欧洲的角度来看，你可能会说美国的保守党相对于正常情况是向右倾的。）因此，英国的保守党（顽固派）实际上与美国的自由党（民主党）相当。英国的自由党工党（Labour）已经足够左倾；
这意味着，英国介入美国政治的直接影响将是会削弱英国左翼和美国右翼的权力美国共和党人可能会拿起枪，而英国工党将动员工人发动瘫痪性罢工。
然而，长期影响却很难预测。实际上，我们可以预期民主党和保守党会合作。但政党最终是利益集团的联盟，他们碰巧在某些领域找到了共同点，而民主党的联合政府与保守党的联合政府截然不同。
最终，我把两党系统结合的过程想象成两个星系碰撞的过程:
这两个政治体系最终会融合成一个连贯的整体，但这一过程将是混乱和破坏性的，原始结构几乎无法幸存。

Political Culture
Britons find American patriotic displays unsettling and distasteful—they find it strange that we play the national anthem before professional sports matches and disturbing that our schoolchildren recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day. They’re repulsed by our habit of mixing religion and politics—no mainstream British politician would end a speech by saying “God bless Britain” or insert their religious views into debates about social issues like abortion. They consider our unwillingness to have government handle basic needs like railways, healthcare, and broadcasting inexplicable and exasperating.
Americans would find the presence of mainstream British politicians who openly describe themselves as “socialists” shocking. We would be unnerved by their fluid attitude towards constitutions (the British “constitution” is not a single written document with special amendment procedures, but rather a collection of ordinary laws about the structure of the United Kingdom which Parliament is free to alter at any time). We find continued British tolerance of vestiges of feudalism, like the established church, the nobility, and the royal family, anachronistic, bizarre, and charming in a faintly condescending way. We would find their tax structures intolerable and their trust in government institutions na?ve. (Did you know the BBC is funded by a ￡157.50 per year tax on households with color televisions? And that it’s one of their largest broadcasters, and carries political news?)

政治文化
英国人对美国人的爱国主义表现感到不安和厌恶——他们对我们在职业体育比赛前演奏国歌感到奇怪，对我们的小学生每天背诵效忠誓言感到不安。他们对我们将宗教和政治混为一谈的习惯感到反感——没有哪个英国主流政治家会在演讲结束时说“上帝保佑英国”，或者把他们的宗教观点插入到有关堕胎等社会问题的辩论中。他们认为，我们不愿意让政府处理铁路、医疗保健和广播等基本需求，这令人费解和愤怒。
美国人会发现，英国主流政客公开称自己是“社会主义者”的这一现象令人震惊。他们对宪法的不稳定态度会让我们感到不安(英国的“宪法”不是一个具有特殊修正程序的单一书面文件，而是关于联合王国结构的普通法律的集合，议会可以随时自由修改这些法律)。我们发现，英国人对封建主义的残余，如国教、贵族和王室，一直保持着宽容的态度，这是不合时宜的、怪异的，而且有点屈尊俯就。我们会发现，他们的税收结构令人难以忍受，他们对政府机构的信任也很幼稚。（你知道英国广播公司的资金来源是每年向拥有彩电的家庭征收157.5英镑的税收吗？它是他们最大的广播公司之一，传播政治新闻？）

Perhaps most importantly, the United States is held together by a “civil religion”—a reverence for the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, symbols like the flag and national anthem, and ultimately the nation itself—that the British would find alien and perhaps even dangerous. Like most of the European countries that saw their cities reduced to rubble in World War II, the United Kingdom rejected nationalism after World War II. America never has, and that has long made Europeans nervous about our political culture. When we say “God bless America”, they hear “Gott mit uns”.
Even more so than the concrete issues of adjusting constitutions, rights, laws, and political parties, bridging the gap between these very different cultures would be a Herculean task, and if it’s not done, it could permanently destabilize the United States. And nobody wants an unstable superpower.

也许最重要的是，美国被一种“公民宗教”团结在一起——对开国元勋、《独立宣言》和《宪法》、国旗和国歌等象征的崇敬，以及最终对国家本身的崇敬——英国人会觉得这是陌生的，甚至可能是危险的。像大多数在第二次世界大战中城市被夷为平地的欧洲国家一样，英国在第二次世界大战后拒绝民族主义。美国从来没有这样做过，这一直让欧洲人对我们的政治文化感到不安。当我们说“上帝保佑美国”时，他们听到的是“上帝与我们同在（Gott mit uns）”。
甚至比调整宪法、权利、法律和政党等具体问题更重要的是，弥合这些截然不同的文化之间的差距将是一项艰巨的任务，如果做不到，它可能会永久地破坏美国的稳定。没有人想要一个不稳定的超级大国。

Other Concerns
The US and UK have incompatible electrical systems, TV standards, and even car designs (due to driving on opposite sides of the road). The UK has converted to metric far more than the US has. And, of course, the US and UK are divided by a common language: though they both (primarily) speak English, they speak different dialects and disagree on how to spell and pronounce many words. These are important because one of the major advantages of the US is that, because there are common nationwide standards, commerce can flow freely across state borders. The British Isles would have to either get with the program or lose out on these benefits.
One other issue is that internationally, it’s actually quite helpful for the US that the UK is a separate country. For instance, the US and Britain both hold permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Having a close friend by your side helps both countries get the things they think need doing done in all sorts of international settings like this. If the UK became a state, both nations would lose this advantage.

其他关注点
美国和英国的电气系统、电视标准甚至汽车设计都不兼容（英国左侧行驶、美国右侧行驶）。相比美国，英国改用公制单位更为彻底。当然，美国和英国的分歧在于拥有共同的语言：尽管他们都（主要）说英语，但他们说不同的方言，在如何拼写和许多单词发音上存在分歧。这些都很重要，因为美国的主要优势之一是，由于有共同的全国标准，商业可以自由地跨州流动。不列颠群岛要么加入这个计划，要么失去这些好处。
另一个问题是，在国际上，实际上英国作为一个独立的国家而存在对美国是很有帮助的。例如，美国和英国都是联合国安理会常任理事国。有一个亲密的朋友在你身边可以帮助两国在各种国际环境中完成他们认为需要做的事情；如果英国成为一个州，两国都将失去这一优势。

Realistically…
It’s not going to happen.
Few Britons will want to give up the Crown.
No existing US state will want to give up so much of its power in Congress to the UK.
No national politician in the UK—currently the biggest fish in a comparatively small pond—will want to be demoted to a state politician in the US.
No Republican will want to bring 64 million liberals into the American electorate. They already complain about 12 million Democratic-leaning illegal immigrants in the US—and those people don’t even have the right to vote.
No Labourite will want to become part of a nation where “socialist” is a dirty word.
No Democrat or Conservative will want to send their party into a chaotic political realignment.
On the world stage, neither nation will want to lose the advantages of having a friendly face in every organization and conference.
And perhaps most importantly, nobody in the new United States would even be able to agree on how “nationalize” should be spelled—or, as Daryl Beggs points out in the comments, how “spelled” should be spelt.
For all of these reasons and many more, it is extremely unlikely that the UK might become a 51st state someday.

现实地说这是不会发生的。
很少有英国人愿意放弃王室。
没有一个现有的美国州会愿意将其在国会的大部分权力交给英国。
英国目前是一个相对较小的池塘里最大的鱼，没有一个国家级别的政治家愿意被降级为美国的州级别的政治家。
没有共和党人愿意把6400万自由主义者纳入美国选民。他们已经在抱怨美国有1200万倾向民主党的非法移民——而这些人甚至都没有投票权哦。
没有一个工党人会想成为这样的国家的一部分:认为“社会主义者”是肮脏的字眼。
没有一个民主党人或保守党会想让他们的政党陷入一场混乱的政治重组局势。
在世界舞台上，英国和美国都不想失去在每一个组织和会议上都有对自己持友好态度的面孔的优势。
也许最重要的是，在新美国，甚至没有人能够就“nationalize”应该如何拼写达成一致——或者，正如达里尔·贝格斯(Daryl Beggs)在评论中指出的那样，“拼写”应该如何拼写。
由于所有这些以及更多的原因，英国极不可能在某一天成为美国的第51个州。