American Democracy in Context. Joseph A. Pika

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СКАЧАТЬ What Compromises Are Necessary for Ratifying a National Constitution?

      It had been a long, hot summer, and the framers of the Constitution were growing weary. The process of drafting a constitution had led to passionate debates about issues ranging from the role of religion in government to how power would be shared between the national and local governments. Since convening in May, the framers had agreed that the national government would consist of three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. The executive branch would be led by a president. A Supreme Court would enforce the Constitution, and the representative government would be elected by the people. Now, as the end of August approached, the framers remained deadlocked on several key issues. Nevertheless, they were determined to find compromises that would allow them to finish their work and send the Constitution on for ratification. Did this scenario take place in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787? No—Baghdad, summer of 2005.

      Indeed, there are some significant similarities between the experiences of the framers in 1787 America and 2005 Iraq. Both were engaged in writing what scholars refer to as “post-conflict constitutions”—that is, constitutions written after winning a struggle for independence or overthrowing an existing government. Both the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and the Constitutional Drafting Committee in Baghdad (each with fifty-five delegates) were attempting to solve what appeared to be insoluble political problems. In 1787 Philadelphia, the framers, concerned with the weakness of the central government under the Articles of Confederation, were attempting to create a national government strong enough to ensure compliance with national law at a time when the core principles of the recently fought American Revolution had instilled in the populace a profound distrust of coercive government by distant rulers. How could they create a national government strong enough to keep the nation together but not so strong as to undermine core principles such as liberty or to excessively infringe on the autonomy of states? In 2005 Baghdad, the framers were similarly trying to balance a strong central government with regional autonomy. And both sets of framers consisted of rival factions that disagreed fundamentally about core issues. Could consensus be built under such circumstances?

      Consider also the significant differences between 1787 Philadelphia and 2005 Baghdad. For one, the American framers were working in uncharted territory. Individual American states had created constitutions in the wake of the Declaration of Independence, but the concept of a written constitution governing an entire nation was new and untested. Moreover, there had never before been a republican (that is, representative) government on the scale of the United States. In contrast, constitution writing had become something of a cottage industry by 2005. In the past 50 years, some 200 new constitutions have been drafted for nations around the world; over 25 since 2005, ranging from Angola to Zimbabwe.¹ This has allowed observers to analyze which processes work best when creating a new constitution.² Another difference was that the Iraqi framers faced a nation much more deeply divided along lines of ethnicity, language, religious sect, and region than did the American framers. Moreover, the post-conflict situations were different: Whereas the American colonists had fought to win their independence from a colonial power, a tyrannical Iraqi government had been overthrown as a result of an invasion by outside forces, and the Iraqis drafted their constitution under the watchful eye of an occupying force.

      The Iraq Constitution was ratified later in 2005 and remains in place. The fact that there are similarities between it and the U.S. Constitution is no accident. The U.S. Constitution has endured and become a model for many constitutions around the world. We now take for granted the success of the U.S. Constitution, but that success is really quite amazing. The American colonies were, as historian Joseph J. Ellis put it, “generally regarded as a provincial and wholly peripheral outpost of Western Civilization.” Despite that, it became the breeding ground for a novel approach to governance that has endured the test of time and emerged as an archetype for success.³

      The American Colonies

      In order to understand the factors that eventually led to the American Revolution, it is first necessary to understand how the colonies came into being and why they endured for so long. Europeans “discovered” America through Christopher Columbus in 1492. By then, North America had been populated for as long as forty thousand years and was already home to as many as ten million aboriginal or native people. France, Holland, and England led some explorations of the eastern seaboard of North America in the 1500s, but the road to English settlement did not really begin until 1606, when King James I issued charters to establish American colonies.

      Motivations for Coming to the Colonies

      Several factors led to the migration of people from England and other European countries to North America. One factor was religion. As early as the 1560s, French Protestants (known as Huguenots) came to what is now South Carolina and Florida to escape religious persecution, and the New England colonies in particular were settled by people seeking religious freedom for themselves. Religious beliefs across the colonies varied considerably. The Pilgrims—a group of religious separatists (those who advocated a complete break with, or separation from, the Church of England)—sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 and settled the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts. The Puritans—a group of nonseparatists (those who sought to reform the Church of England rather than break away from it)—settled the Massachusetts Bay colony, soon outnumbering the Pilgrims. The Maryland colony was originally envisioned as a haven for English Catholics, though in the end, few Catholics settled there. Meanwhile, Huguenots were also drawn to the religiously tolerant Dutch colony of New Netherland (which later became the English colonies of New York and New Jersey) because the Dutch Reformed Church there reflected the Huguenots’ Calvinist beliefs.

      In addition to religion, economic incentives drew people to the colonies. This was especially true in colonies from Maryland southward, where colonists were lured by the opportunity to make money by growing tobacco. Virginia, for instance, began not as a religious refuge but as a corporate colony financed by a joint stock company. As a result, the southern colonies were more religiously and ethnically diverse than their northern counterparts.⁴ The emphasis on growing crops for profit in the south led to the development of large plantations and inhibited urban development. Initially, these plantations lured young men from England and other European countries to work on them as indentured servants—laborers who entered a contract to work for no wages for a fixed period of time (usually three to seven years) in return for food, clothing, shelter, and their transportation to the colony. Some have suggested that as many as half of all white immigrants to the colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may have come as indentured servants. Later, white servitude gave way to slavery when plantation owners resorted to buying slaves from Africa.

      British Influences on American Political Thought

      Two documents—the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights—greatly influenced American political thought. Each contained principles that the colonists eventually used to justify revolution. Later, those principles served as foundations for the new government they created. Likewise, two events in England in the 1600s—civil war and the Glorious Revolution—served in the short run to preoccupy the British and distract their attention from the colonies while in the long run serving as models for resisting the arbitrary power of kings.

      The Magna Carta

      The Magna Carta (which means “great charter” in Latin, the language in which it was written) dates to 1215, when King John (ruler of England from 1199 to 1216) was forced to sign it by English barons who had revolted after John had imposed heavy taxes, waged an unsuccessful war with France, and quarreled with the Pope. It is one of the great documents in Western civilization, and its articulation of rights strongly influenced the framers of the U.S. Constitution.

      The Magna Carta was a practical document СКАЧАТЬ