Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today by Scott Gordon (review)

HUMANITIES 137 The Hutu government increasingly courted extremist views that played on Hutu insecurities and fears of the minority Tutsis. Despite rising human rights violations and heightened propaganda dehumanizing the Tutsi population, the French government offered unconditional support to the Hutu government in its struggle against the RPF. The ensuing genocide between April and June of 1994 claimed between 500,000 and 800,000 lives, mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus. In the early days of the genocide, the United Nations, instead of reinforcing its mission in Rwanda, cut back its presence, resulting in an exercise of futility that nearly destroyed the mission=s commander, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire. Although Orend=s discussion of this case focuses on the question of whether the United States would have been justified in intervening in Rwanda, it would have been more appropriate to discuss the responsibilities of France, as well as of the UN. (Indeed, France did act later, but, it seems, mainly to help Hutus, including former genocidaires, who were retreating upon the advance of RPF forces.) Ultimately, the Rwandan tragedy points to the central inadequacies of just war theories that are predicated on a problematic intervention/non-intervention distinction. No state is an island, and cases of intrastate violence typically do not occur in an international vacuum. Acknowledgment of the interconnections between domestic and international realms would lead to radically different arguments about the moral responsibilities of >external= parties. Orend interprets Kant conservatively and contends, along with Michael Walzer, that cases such as the Rwandan genocide would make forcible intervention only morally permissible rather than obligatory. Unfortunately, Orend does not discuss the idea of an obligation to prevent and suppress genocide that already exists in international law, in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Orend is surely right that >a more secure, safe and just world ... is not beyond the grasp of creatures such as us.= His book, however, may lead one to be sceptical that just war theory, especially with a conservative Kantian basis, can help us to realize that world. (CATHERINE LU) Scott Gordon. Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today Harvard University Press 1999. xii, 396. US $59.95 Political theory long has been preoccupied with the problem of >coercive= political authority; those exercises of political power that arbitrarily restrict freedom and liberty. Constitutionalism, it is argued, solves this problem by distributing political power among several competing institutions, each with sufficient independence from the other. The solution resides, then, in a constitutional design where countervailing centres of authority check political power. Scott Gordon=s ambitious treatise traces the development of 138 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 this version of constitutionalism that aims to >control= the state. This constraining account of constitutionalism Gordon designates the >pluralist= model of government. It is Gordon=s thesis that good and efficient government arises when pluralist constitutional design >enables power to be controlled and properly directed.= Liberty is enhanced, maintains Gordon, when political authority is in check. The pluralist model is contrasted with the hierarchical (or >absolutist=) model of government, associated with Jean Bodin, where political power is centred in a single supreme authority. Political and legal theory long has been preoccupied with identifying that supreme source of political authority . Gordon chooses the side of the counter-tradition, tracing the >provenance= of the pluralist idea from the ancient Greek and Roman traditions, through its articulation in the Conciliar movement, the Dutch and Venetian republics, and English constitutionalism, to its fullest articulation in the 1787 Constitution of the United States. The principle of countervailance was not fully realized in these early regimes, Gordon admits. Nor would political theorists in many of these periods (the Greek, Roman, Dutch, and English regimes under discussion) have admitted that theirs were regimes of checks and balances. Though he devotes considerable space to the political thought of these times, Gordon=s emphasis is on the institutional arrangements that made these governments work. The book, in this regard, provides a valuable synthesis of constitutional governments at work. Constitutionalism, according to Gordon=s account, is a theory and practice of political authority preoccupied with the maximization of liberty. It is not about democracy per se. Modern readers readily associate constitutionalism with democracy...