Filed under: Freedom, History, Law, The Constitution | Tags: Eighteenth English Theories, European Constitutions, Mark Steyn on the Constitution
“The republic’s founders were, I’m afraid, British subjects animated by certain eighteenth-century English theories about liberty, themselves deriving from the principles of common law and Magna Carta. It is not “Eurocentric ” to make such an obvious point. Indeed, “Europe” was noticeably antipathetic to these ideas and in many ways still is. That’s why, while America still has only the same yellowing parchment it started out with two centuries ago, the continent has lurched through its Third Reichs and Fourth Republics and wholesale constitutional rewrites every generation. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than the French, German, Italian, Belgian, Greek and Spanish constitutions, it’s older than all of them put together. The ideas of a relatively small group of Englishmen on the rule of law and responsible government have been responsible for centuries of sustained peaceful constitutional evolution in America, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Barbados, Mauritius. True, of those Englishmen, America got the exceptional talents, as is clear from a casual comparison of The Federalist Papers and an equivalent opus called Canada’s Founding Debates. But generally, around the world, the likelihood of living your life unmolested by the arbitrary cruelties of government is inversely proportional to how far the state departs from Anglo-American theories of liberty.”
From Mark Steyn
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I have never been able to figure out why some people in America feel it is necessary to constantly contrast America’s democratic credentials with those of Europe’s, always to play down Europe’s. Sure, people can point to monarchies like Spain or Belgium, or former ones like Italy and France and beat there chests.
But the United States also has always had the advantage of being surrounded by water to its east and west, with a friendly, much smaller country with similar origins to the north, and a country that the United States has been able to overpower militarily to the south. Europe, by contrast is an over-crowded continent, riven by age-old rivalries that have led to constantly changing balances of power, eventually leading to destructive wars, requiring wrenching changes as old orders have replaced the new. In Europe, and in many countries of Latin America, there is a tendency to write new Constitutions. In the United States the Constitution is modified by Ammendments and, where clarification is needed, by Supreme Court rulings.
Of those European countries that have been isolated, either by sea or by mountains, their governments and constitutions have proven to be pretty stable. Iceland held its first Parliament more than 1,000 years ago, and apart from a long difficult period of occupation by Denmark, today boasts one of the most stable democracies in the world. (Their banking system is another matter.) Switzerland’s current constitution, which emerged some decades after the country was freed from Napoleonic occupation, dates from 1874.
The U.S. Constitution certainly influenced Switzerland’s. But, likewise, the U.S. Constitution was inspired in no small part by an earlier constitution drawn up in 1755 by the Corsican patriot, Pasquale di Paoli (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasquale_Paoli). That Constitution worked pretty well, by the way, until Corsica was taken over by the French.
Thomas Jefferson knew Paoili when both were living in London, so he would have also been familiar with Paoli’s constitution. There are even towns named in honor of Paoli in Colorado, Indiana, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.
Comment by Subsidy Eye September 18, 2010 @ 2:41 amOne thing I forgot to mention between the First Corsican Constitution and the U.S. Constitution was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1765), Constitutional Project for Corsica
I like this quote from the document:
The “Anglo-Americans” are not the only people who have had “theories of liberty” that have helped to influence freedom around the world.
Comment by Subsidy Eye September 18, 2010 @ 4:42 am