In 1838, the Pitcairn Islands constitution recognized the right to a safe environment – a principle that the United Nations did not officially adopt until this October.įor more than 25 years, Project Syndicate has been guided by a simple credo: All people deserve access to a broad range of views by the world's foremost leaders and thinkers on the issues, events, and forces shaping their lives. Moving adroitly from the familiar cases of the American and French post-revolutionary constitutions, she examines more unfamiliar cases such as the constitutions of Papua New Guinea and the Pitcairn Islands, and how they even pioneered rights we are only now coming to recognize. She reminds us that the act of drafting constitutions was hardly the exclusive preserve of Western industrializing nation-states. In her illuminating and wide-ranging book, Colley weaves a historical web that draws in countries from almost every continent.
That, along with its successor, the Humble Petition and Advice, undergirded Britain’s government throughout Cromwell’s Lord Protectorship, until Charles II’s restoration to the throne brought an end to Britain’s experiment with republicanism – and with formal constitutions. It was ravaged by civil war in the mid-1600s, leading to the adoption of the Instrument of Government and the installation of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector in 1653.
Even Great Britain, long fabled as the country without a codified constitution, was not immune to the “warlike pressure” of this period. In The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen, Colley describes how the modern nation-state – and modern constitutionalism – emerged from the smoke of the cannon fire that engulfed the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This claim raises an important question: What will today’s belligerent, combative politics in many countries mean for the future of liberal democracy, whose principles and values are arguably under siege like never before?
LONDON – It is the crucible of war, Linda Colley argues, that forges constitutions. Jan-Werner Mueller, Democracy Rules, Allen Lane, London, 2021 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2021. Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World, Liveright, 2021.