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Chapter 6 Conclusions: Sustainable Constitutionalism Through Practice Constitutionalism can be viewed from a variety of perspectives, as a historical or sociological phenomenon, philosophical concept or desirable or practical political and legal system. It can be approached through the prism of certain core ideas such as the limitation of the powers of government , rule of law, or sovereignty. This concept can also be understood more broadly as an aspect of political culture that is related to a wider framework of political, social, and cultural processes, or normative and institutional development. I have attempted to draw on some of these perspectives and related ideas, without claiming to exhaustively apply any of them in particular. My purpose is more limited and specific, namely, to explore and clarify a process-based approachto the promotion and consolidation of constitutionalism in present African countries. In my view, the deeply contextual and evolutionary understanding of the concept presented in this book can be helpful in exploring possible strategies and policies for developing the concept and its institutions in African countries. This approach can also be useful for achieving similar objectives in relation to other parts of the world, provided it is applied in the same deeply contextual and evolutionary manner in each case. Although this chapter is presented as a concluding chapter, I will begin with some reflections on the origins and evolutions of modern constitutionalism in Britain, the United States, and France, as countries where this concept is generally considered to be well established. This somewhat substantive discussion could have logically been presented in the first chapter of this book by way of definition of the concept. I have deliberately postponed this comparative review in order to emphasize that these experiences may be useful to consider as comparative, without taking them to as definitive of African constitutionalism. Accordingly, this review is not intended as a comprehensive or up-to-date statement of all relevant developments in those countries. The main point I am trying to make here is that the relevant philosophical underpinnings and political/legal institutions have emerged very gradually, and have been tested and adapted, through a concrete historical process that was highly Sustainable Constitutionalism Through Practice 161 specific to each setting. The apparent ultimate success of the concept in all three countries was neither immediate nor taken for granted at any point in that long process, indeed the outcome in each case was contingent on a variety of factors, both internal and external to those settings. This emphasis on local context and possibilities of different "roads" to similar goals should not preclude comparative analysis and theoretical generalization about some of the basic themes and issues of constitutionalism and related concepts. This will be attempted in the last two sections of this chapter, where I offer some general reflections on different theoretical perspectives on the origins and development of constitutionalism , and then examine its symbiotic relationship to democracy. Western Experiences in Constitutionalism It is commonly asserted that Western constitutionalism as an intellectual discourse maintains important continuities with an old and rich tradition of thought all the way back to Athens. Billias, for instance, points out that American and European constitutionalism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew inspiration from the same resources of western civilization and thought. This legacy is said to have comprised "religious ideas stemming from the Judeo-Christian tradition, ideas derived from the constitutions of classical antiquity in Greece and Rome, constitutional theories developed by thinkers in the medieval period, and ideas revived in the Renaissance by writers like Machiavelli" (Billias 1990: 14). One may wonder about the so-called "[udeo-Christian tradition" when the exclusion and persecution of Jews was one of the shared features of Western constitutionalism until well into the twentieth century in some cases. It is also possible to question the distinctiveness of the purported constitutions of ancient Greece and Rome in contrast to their contemporaries in Persia and India, or how they somehow managed to reach Enlightenment Europe unadulterated by influences or experiences of the Islamic civilization which transmitted earlier legacies to medieval Europe. Moreover, such presumed continuities do not account for the social and economic conditions that probably provided a stronger impetus for the actual historical context in which modern Western constitutionalism first emerged and evolved. In any case, neither type of genesis precludes consideration of a different set of factors or characteristics as the basis of the emergence and development of the concept in other parts of the world. It is also relevant...

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