‘Constitutions serve a managerial purpose’

‘Constitutions serve a managerial purpose’

While we take written Constitutions for granted today, human beings did not always organise their societies based on rules laid out in a single document. In an exclusive interview, Linda Colley, professor of history at Princeton University, who has done extensive research on the role of written constitutions in the evolution of the modern world of nation states, and was in India recently on a lecture tour, tells The Mag how they served as political devices that fostered internal colonialism and aided overland and maritime empire. Excerpts: The dominant view of a written constitution is that it is a progressive force. Are you suggesting that it is primarily a tool of empire? Would you say that of the Indian Constitution as well? In part because the advent of modern written constitutions is so closely bound up with the American and French Revolutions, these instruments tend to be viewed as a progressive force. They often have been, but it depends on the constitution in question. In practice, constitutions can be both progressive and authoritarian. For instance, Stalin drafted a constitution in the ’30s which provided for democracy and which was ratified by over 50 million people. But this constitution was also worded so as to tie the different parts of the Soviet empire tightly together. As Edmund Burke analysed in the 1790s, virtually all written constitutions (including India’s) are the work of small groups of individuals. As senior advocate Rajeev Dhavan writes, many parts of India’s Constitution “struck a chord with some of the people. But whether ‘the people’ participated in the process of constitution-making is highly doubtful”. Virtually all constitutions have some kind of didactic and managerial purpose. How would you characterise the relationship between the American constitution and American empire today? The Federal Constitution of 1787 helped conceal from white Americans that the USA retained imperial features: it excluded indigenous peoples and blacks as well as women from citizenship, yet fostered the idea of all of the American continent as potentially a Union, a nation. Since the late 19th century, Americans have also (along with the British) been keen on writing constitutions for others — for instance, for Japan and Germany after 1945. As this suggests, the American constitution is a vital part of American self-legitimation as well as a text of government. It is a text which caters to the still powerful notion that the US is the vital beacon of liberty for the world. How do you account for the universal popularity of the written constitution? What was the single biggest factor in its gaining such wide acceptance? The success and prosperity of the US after 1787 was a great advertisement for written constitutions, especially after slavery was abolished there with the Civil War. But the most powerful reason why written constitutions took off, I suspect, was that their invention coincided with a mass expansion of print across the continents. This is one of the most important and unexplored aspects of 19th century global history: how newspapers and magazines reprinted written constitutions from across the world and so gave people struggling for rights all sorts of new political ideas. How do you respond to the fact that the past year has seen so many mass mobilsations and people’s protests in many parts of the world, many of them asking for nothing more than for implementation of constitutional guarantees? This shows both the strength and the limits of written constitutions. They are only as good and as effective as how far they are implemented and abided by, by the powerful. If a country’s rulers and military can override or ignore them, written constitutions, as James Madison said, are no more than pieces of parchment or paper.