Good thing that’s not what I was responding to.
Right, because that’s never been repeated in any other case. No other federal country has evolved that way, and that makes the US Constitution exceptional. 
Plus the patronizing tone of the post, of course.
I guess Canada, Australia, India, Pakistan and South Africa just appeared somehow. Sorta like Athena springing wholly formed from Zeus’s forehead.
At the Quebec Conference in 1864, the Fathers of Confederation could not even agree on the name of the new polity.
I meant in the sense that prior to the Constitution, the United States wasn’t really defined- it was still a set of mostly sovereign states that were federated under the Articles of Confederation, but there was no national ability to tax or enforce laws. Largely there were 13 states and an extremely weak central government of sorts for about eight years between independence and the signing of the Constitution.
The Constitution in contrast allowed for a much stronger Federal government, and clearly defined the relationship between the States and the Federal Government, and what powers the states were delegating to the Federal government, and what they weren’t.
It’s literally what defined the United States as an entity. This is very unlike say… Canada, whose Constitution may define the governmental structure, but “Canada” as an entity long predated it. Same thing with Australia, India, Pakistan, and South Africa. Nobody’s realistically going to say that South Africa didn’t exist or wasn’t a thing until 1997. But it’s a reasonable argument to say that the United States largely didn’t exist as a unified whole until 1788.
I’m not saying the US Constitution is “special” in any meaningful way, I’m saying it’s definitional to the US in ways that other countries’ constitutions aren’t.
And we’re saying, again, that this is simply not true. As I described above, Luxembourg’s 1841 constitution is precisely definitional. It carves the territory out of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and defines it as a separate semi-autonomous entity within the larger state. And this is just one example out of many possible. The US is not exceptional. It’s just another country with just another constitution.
Australia, as a geological entity existed after the break-up of Gondwanda, and the landmass is recognised as a continent.
As a political entity (The Commonwealth of) Australia came into existence in 1901 when a group of independent colonies/states determined to federate, in a process remarkably consistent with the creation of United States of America from independent colonies/states located on the North American continent … without the unpleasantness of staging a mutiny.
Was there not a Grand Duchy of Luxembourg prior to that though? Was there not a Luxembourgian identity separate from the Netherlands prior to that? I suspect there was, even if there wasn’t an actual nation-state with that name.
I think maybe we’re tripping on semantics; what I’m trying to say is that the Constitution defines both the political entity of the United States, as well as the national identity, which is different than many (most?) other nations. There wasn’t the same sort of British North American Colonist identity prior to the Constitution, largely because the Articles of Confederation were so ineffectual and didn’t really create a nation in any meaningful sense. It’s not anything special about the Constitution itself, it’s just that we don’t have a national identity that’s congruent with the ethnic identity of the inhabitants. Most nations do have that, some don’t. The Constitution is what forged the new nation into a coherent whole, so we treat it as representing a bit more than just the legal construct.
Australia may be pretty close to the way the US is- I’m not sure to what degree someone identified as Australian vs. Queenslander in say… 1885.
The first Federal Council of Australasia (note the name difference) was formed in 1885, as a consultative body and two states (New South Wales and South Australia) did not join.
I’m afraid I disagree with your understanding of Canadian history. British North America was a region in the British Empire. It was not a single entity. In 1867, there were five British colonies or provinces in eastern North America: Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Province of Canada. They were all independent of each other, and were subject to the British government and Parliament. There was no British North American government, and no shared political ties, other than membership in the British Empire. The Charlottetown Conference in 1864, which was the beginning of Confederation, was the first time that many of the leaders of each province met the leaders of the other provinces. There was no equivalent of the Articles of Confederation or the Continental Congress in British North America.
The Province of Canada was a forced merger of Upper Canada with Lower Canada, imposed by the British government in 1841, and opposed by most leaders in Lower Canada, and some in Upper Canada. Its constitution had been created by the British government and politicians, not by the inhabitants of Lower Canada and Upper Canada. By 1867, it had only existed for 27 years, and was politically badly deadlocked. Some politicians in the Province of Canada were calling for it to be broken up.
The Confederation movement was the first time that leaders from the five provinces actually met and worked towards forming a new British North American polity. There had been a couple of discussions of a federal union before then, but they went nowhere. In fact, the Charlottetown Conference was not called to discuss a BNA federation; it was summoned for the more limited goal of discussion whether the three Maritime provinces could be unified.
The constitution that was produced by the three conferences (Charlottetown, Quebec, and London) was the first constitution for BNA that was produced by the colonists themselves. All the other government structures had been imposed by the imperial powers (first France, then Britain).
As I mentioned in an earlier post, there wasn’t even initial agreement on the name of the new polity. The Quebec Conference deferred the name to the Queen (ie the British government). There were a lot of names proposed:
It was not until the 1866 London conference that the delegates settled on the name of “Canada” Even then, the name of the British statute that established Canada is telling: British North America Act, 1867. No mention of Canada in the title, but rather a reference to the colonial possessions of the British Empire.
That Act did exactly what the US Constitution did: established a federal government for the first time and defined its powers, and relationship with the pre-existing colonial governments. That was an entirely new level of government, that had not existed before. It also was unprecedented within the British Empire: the new country of Canada was the first federation in the Empire.
So no, I disagree with your assumption that “Canada” had long pre-existed. As in the southern colonies, the region that became Canada as we know it today was a collection of colonies that gradually came together in a federation. The key difference was that Confederation was a peaceful process, unlike the unpleasantness down south.
That’s an excellent synopsis of Canadian history and I certainly enjoyed reading it. Thanks for providing that.
Ignorance fought!
I had thought that Canada had basically acquired its own identity about the same time that the US split out of British North America in 1775, but that’s not the case.
Either way, it’s less common that a constitution defines a nation in both the legal sense and in the identity sense- it seems like the more common path is to have a nation in the sense of a national identity, culture, ethnicity, etc. and then the governments themselves may change, but the “nation” doesn’t.
And in the case of the US, we put a lot of reverence into our Constitution, because it’s what basically keeps us together; the states’ semi-sovereignty gives our system a certain tension that I’m not sure is there in systems where the sub-units originally held all the power.
I think you’re overestimating the extent to which most countries are unified polities. Germany and Italy, just for example, were collections of principalities not very long ago, and while you can talk about shared languages as forming natural national boundaries as some like to do, that’s how you get a lot of European wars. And then when you get outside of Europe, a great many national boundaries were drawn by colonial Europeans and have even less to do with pre-existing polities.
Without doing a case by case analysis, I would guess that more nations than not are more defined by their constitution than by some sort of underlying nationhood.
Glad you liked it. Thanks.
Yes, well done, NoPi.
As an American I don’t worship the U.S. Constitution, but I greatly respect it, and am very glad that we have it.
The Framers got much more right than they got wrong. Their biggest mistakes IMHO were:
The Constitution provides a structure of ordered liberty which has otherwise served the American people extremely well since 1787. It is not perfect, it is not exactly what I would have it be, and it is under extraordinary stress right now given the policies, ambitions and temperament of the incumbent President. But it is still our Constitution, and I have several times before God sworn oaths - to which I hope to be true, unto death - to preserve, protect and defend it.
The more I learn about the Canadian Constitution, the more I respect it as a very reasonable document. We were not really taught it in any detail in school, such as the important legal decisions based on it. Canadians do not rever it.
But it reflects Canadian values well, notwithstanding a few politicians using loopholes to ignore it and pursue controversial policies. The Canadian constitution outlines a number of rights but says above all that things must be reasonable. As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances.
In all fairness, we only needed two tries. You needed 5.
Naah, my country has only existed since 1994. We just have the one.
I mean, ALL politicians (in a position to try, e.g. not backbenchers) do this. That is the very nature of rulebooks, which is all a Constitution is.
Canada’s constitution was, by design, a compromise. It’s a very practical document, albeit to some extent practical in a way meant for a country that was very different when parts of it were written.
No Constitution is going to be perfect, and frankly, thin slicing the differences between this one or that one is irrelevant, and quite missing the point. The best written constitution is dead in the water once a critical mass of the population no longer thinks it counts.
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, part of our Constitution, has OBVIOUS holes in it - the ability of a government to simply say “nah, fuck that, this right is suspended” for years is a pretty clear example of that. But what matters more than that obvious hole is whether Canadians THINK the Charter matters. If they do, then things like freedom of expression or getting a trial in a reasonable time will be generally upheld. If we stop thinking it matters, they’re lost, no matter what Section 33 says.
I am not a lawyer, but I felt I wanted to better understand Canadian constitutional law, so I read a used textbook on it. I was actually impressed at the wisdom Supreme Court justices generally apply to complex cases. You get the impression from reading the papers that things are slapdash. Things are slow, occasionally they are, and the legal system itself has many well-known problems. But the law itself makes an enormous amount of sense and the people who decide it tend to have done so very reasonably. Any law is a compromise. Our Constitution is a very solid document all told. However laws in many countries sound more impressive than their practice.
Four tries by the imperial power and the white supremacists.
One try by the people of South Africa as a whole.
Here in Japan, my sense is that most people really don’t have strong opinions about the constitution, which was written by the American GHQ under MacArthur in less than a week.
The largest controversy is about Article 9 which renounces the right to wage war except in self defence. Hawks keep pushing to make changes and trying to revoke this article, or make end runs around it.
Having lived in Asia forever now, I often get annoyed with American exceptionalism when it comes up. I grew up in Mormonism, which holds that the US constitution is divinely inspired. My high school AP US history teacher, obviously Mormon, couldn’t come out directly and say that, but he said enough that we could tell. One of my non-Mormon friends in the class was wondering what was up with how he taught the constitution and I had to explain the belief.