Constitutional Cultures

This volume investigates the nature of constitutional democratic government in the United States and elsewhere. It provides comprehensive tools for analyzing and comparing different forms of constitutional democracy. The collection will be of interest to students and readers in political science, law, history and political philosophy.

Although the most important constitutional doctrine worldwide, a thorough cultural and historical examination of proportionality has not taken place until now. This comparison of proportionality with its counterpart in American constitutional law - balancing - shows how culture and history can create deep differences in seemingly similar doctrines. Owing to its historical origin in Germany, proportionality carries to this day a pro-rights association, while the opposite is the case for balancing. In addition, European legal and political culture has shaped proportionality as intrinsic to the state's role in realizing shared values, while in the United States a suspicion-based legal and political culture has shaped balancing in more pragmatic and instrumental terms. Although many argue that the USA should converge on proportionality, the book shows that a complex web of cultural associations make it an unlikely prospect.

Written constitutions are an important attribute of nation states and have become a global phenomenon over the past 200 years. The process began with the revolutions in the Atlantic World, from where it spread to other regions. The present volume looks into the complex of constitutions, the fundamental values conveyed by the constitutional texts, the building and functioning of new constitutional bodies and their symbolic representation. All the authors work on the assumption that in order to fully understand the constitutional order and its history, it is necessary, in addition to studying the legal text, to analyse its special forms of implementation and legitimisation. Therefore, culture is seen as an important component of constitutional history. The volume brings together historians from Argentina, France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain and the United States; all are specialised in constitutional history and political culture in the 19th century. Their contributions include case studies on the colonial European powers as well as their colonies or ex-colonies in the Americas. A special aim of the volume is to show the connectedness of the constitutional processes that took place in these regions during the late 18th and the 19th centuries. By connecting two vibrant research areas, this volume makes an important contribution to studies on political culture and the history of the Atlantic World. The book targets a broad academic readership, especially in the fields of cultural studies, history, and political science, and contributes to an internationalisation of the academic debate on the concept of constitutional culture.

This work is a cross-national examination of the relationship between political culture and constitutionalism. The countries studied include Nigeria, Turkey and Japan. Questions explored include whether constitutions must evolve and whether constitutionalism is only a western concept.

A comparison of proportionality, the dominant doctrine in constitutional law worldwide, with the American doctrine of balancing.

Despite decades of nation-building exercise, ethnic-based claims for substantive equality, justice and equitable political inclusion and socio-economic order continue to result in communal rivalries. These are claims that define and represent the issue of minorities in Africa, of which these conflicts are manifestations. Although ethnic conflicts in Africa have been a subject of a large number of studies, the potential and role of norms on minority rights to address claims that ethno-cultural groups raise has not received the attention it deserves. Based on materials from normative political theory and international human rights law and using an empirical and prescriptive analysis, this book defends a robust system of minority rights built around culture, equality and self-determination. This is employed to elaborate an adequate constitutional design providing policy frameworks (multilingual language policy, recognition and affirmation of cultural diversity,), structures (that ensure just representation and participation of members of all groups) and norms (that guarantee substantive equality and the rights to language, religion and culture). The study then proffers two cases studies (South Africa and Ethiopia) to ascertain how such constitutional design might be translated into actual policy frameworks, institutions and norms.