From 1775 through 1785 there existed the Continental Navy, this military force was collectively possessed by the (then) thirteen separate countries that formed the united States of America.
Multiple nations, joined in an alliance, with a single Navy.
To carry this ball further... During this time period and after, the US Constitution was crafted to limit the concept of a standing army. The government could not, constitutionally, form a standing army for longer than two years and was not able to appropriate money for army use. The idea of a standing army was a source of constitutional debate.
And there are sovereign states today that do not maintain a standing army -- the Republic of Costa Rica, for instance. This doesn't mean that possession of a military is not a trait of statehood.
Well, that was the intent behind the Articles of Confederation. But it's important to remember that the "Founding Fathers" were not a politically united group with a common agenda. Some wanted the newly-independent states to be a single sovereign state; some others even wanted to sunder the Articles and have them be completely independent, with no alliance whatsoever.
Yes -- because they discovered that trying to give state-like authorities to an alliance ultimately doesn't work. Either the alliance will evolve into a sovereign state -- which is what happened to the American Confederation with the adoption of the Constitution -- or it will collapse.
Revisionist nonsense. Those same southern states, when they had control of the federal government, were perfectly willing to come down hard on the side of federal power instead of states rights when it was a case of free states trying to resist enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, or to grant freedom to slaves who stepped foot in free state soil. The armed raids Southern slavers led into free state territory puts lie to the notion that they actually believed in states' rights.
And those same state leaders, upon seceding from the Union, literally issued declarations of the causes of secession, explicitly saying that they seceded from the union because of their belief that the new Lincoln administration was a threat to the institution of slavery. Hell, the Confederate States Vice President gave a big speech about how white supremacy and black slavery were the cornerstones of Confederate society.
The South did not secede because of "states' rights." It seceded because its governments were controlled by slave lords who profited from the forced labor of a third of the South's population.
No, it proves that there was a civil war going on and that some state governments tried to avoid taking a side.
1718? I hope you mean 1778.
And, no, nobody served as President of the United States between 1778 and 1787. Those men were serving as
President of the United States in Congress Assembled. "The United States in Congress Assembled" being the full formal name of the Congress under the Articles of Confederation.
In other words -- these men were serving as Presidents of the Congress. They were the Congress's presiding officers, the equivalent of our modern Speaker of the House or President Pro Tempore of the Senate. They were
not the Presidents of the United States of America, and they were not the heads of state or government. No such office exist; they were just the presiding officers of the legislature.
Jefferson Davis was the first and only president of the Confederate States of America established in 1861. The CSA constitution, modeled after the US Constitution, allowed for a president to be elected by popular vote.
Don't be absurd. Jefferson Davis wasn't elected by popular vote, because
one-third of the Confederacy's population (the one-third held in chains) was not allowed to vote.
(
ETA #2: And that is to say nothing of the fact that fully half of both the Confederate States's
and the United States's populations were not allowed to vote, being women. Neither government was an actual democracy in the 1860s; both were explicitly built on an anti-democratic patriarchy, and the Confederate States was explicitly built on an anti-democratic white supremacy. End edit #2.)
If you're looking for an example of a President who serves as both head of state and head of government but who is elected by the legislature rather than by popular vote, your best bet would be to look at the post-Apartheid Republic of South Africa. The President of the Republic of South Africa, starting with Nelson Mandela, definitely serves as both head of state and head of government, but is elected by the National Assembly, the lower house of the Parliament. However, in citing South Africa's example, it is important to understand that this is a historical anomaly arising from the modern presidency having evolved out of the office of prime minister during the Apartheid era.
Which brings me back to an earlier point the EU might be a better example to use. It started out as a trade alliance before becomming more of a political alliance. The questions is will it become a Federation of States?
I think the European Union is a good example in
cultural terms, but not in political terms. Partially this is because I think the E.U. is going through a protracted crisis as a result of it and its peoples not being willing to decide if it should be a sovereign state or a mere alliance. They have delegated to it some of the powers of a sovereign state and undermined their own nations' sovereignties in the process -- and this has led to a
huge democratic deficit. To wit:
Greece being unable to meet its debts by devaluing its currency and just biting the bullet and printing more money before then building its economy back up, because they don't have control of their own monetary policy. This has resulted in the regional hegemon, Germany, being able to essentially dictate policy to the Greek government if they want to continue to have access to E.U. loans -- violating the democratic will of the Greek people and forcing the Greek government to essentially make policy with a German gun to its head.
So you have an institution with very little democratic input in its own constitutional arrangements, dictating policy in violation of the democratic will of one of its constituent polities, when that constituent polity has nominally not surrendered its sovereignty. It's a anti-democratic nightmare.
This whole problem could have been avoided if the E.U. were either clearly an alliance to whom sovereign powers had not been delegated -- allowing Greece to devalue its currency and start paying off its debts -- or if the E.U. were clearly its own sovereign state with its own democratic legislature and executive -- giving Greece and other E.U. polities in similar situations access to the full resources of the E.U. the same way Mississippi has access to the full resources of the United States.
So, no, I don't think the E.U. has it currently stands is a good model. Not only are the most powerful E.U. institutions themselves unelected, but the E.U. is essentially acting right now to subvert the democratic process in its member states. It's become a tool of German hegemony rather than an embodiment of European unity.
(ETA: I hasten to add that I am not "anti-Europe" per se. Rather, I am anti-current E.U. arrangement. I would tend to prefer to see the E.U. evolve into its own sovereign, democratic, federal state, with its own elected Parliament, its own elected President, its own elected Prime Minister, its own Supreme Court, its own Constitution, its own military, etc.)
