Challenge: Voltairize the USA

How can you make this quote be accurate?

"The United States of America are not united, not states, and not of America."
 
George Washington dies before he became president and the States become independent republics. Eventually the United States of America become an E.U. like organization.
 
The Articles of Confederation fail and no new constitution is passed, and thus become independent.

Or they remain part of the British Commonwealth, but call themselves the USA anyway, even though all their governments are separate and subservient to the English crown.

And of course instead of America have it called Vespuccia, or have people realize that America stretches from Canada to Patagonia :p
 

Thande

Donor
The hard part is that 'united' and 'states' is a contradiction. Resolved in OTL by the fact that the modern USA uses a ridiculous definition of 'states', but you have exactly the opposite problem in this scenario.

'Not of America' is easy, because it's often been pointed out that the USA only consists of a small percentage of the Americas (it was originally the slightly less ambitious 'United States of North America').
 
The way I see it, the quote means the United States of America can't be in the Americas at all.

And it has to be Voltaire who says it.

Here's one possibility.

Amerigo Vespucci's family becomes a lot more wealthy and influential, their name is as well-known as names like Columbus and Shakespeare.

The continents of the New World are still named N. and S. America.

OTL, the Dutch colonized South Africa in the 17th-18th centuries; they find plenty of gold and diamonds.

The colonies become autonomous. Amerigo Vespucci was apparently Italian, but his descendants can be all over Europe, and some of them are in South Africa, and for whatever philosophical reason the colonists are badgered into naming their new nation, America.

The colonies are really a loose confederation of autonomous states, similar to a precursor to OTL's UN, but they want to present a united front to everybody else, so they call themselves the "United States of America."

Or, these can be British colonies in South Africa, or India.

India wasn't really a single, unified region like it is today, it was a collection of small kingdoms, and rather than name the region after one of those kingdoms, it gets named after Amerigo Vespucci because one of his descendants was a big shot in British colonial India in the mid-18th century.

So it's really a loose confederation or something.

I know I've left out lots of detail, just in case these aren't such good ideas.

Is any of this plausible?
 
Hm... the American Revolution fails, prominent leaders are offered exile in France, where they take up residence and claim to be the legitimate government of the "United States of America"?
 
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