American Constitutionalism Heard Round the World, 1776-1989: A Global Perspective

Preface

xi Preface American constitutionalism represents this country’s greatest gift to human freedom. This book demonstrates how its ideals, ideas, and institutions influenced different peoples, in different lands, and at different times for more than two hundred years. But the story of its influence abroad remains largely untold.1 This oversight is not for lack of scholars addressing the subject but for their narrow definition of two key terms: “American constitutionalism ” and “influence.” Most writers have equated American constitutionalism solely with the U.S. Constitution, one being viewed as the written expression of the other. To them, the measure of influence is the degree to which foreign constitutionalists copied this or that specific feature from the American charter. Not surprisingly, such scholars have concluded that the influence of American constitutionalism abroad is, in the words of one, “shallow and unstable.”2 American constitutional influence is, however, more substantial and stable than critics have alleged. The complete expression of American constitutionalism derives not from a single document but rather from a collection of six texts written between 1776 and 1791. Besides the U.S. Constitution, these include the Declaration of Independence, the first state constitutions, the Articles of Confederation, The Federalist, and the Bill of Rights. All reflect the revolutionary republican constitutionalism of the founding era and articulate the principles of American constitutionalism . That decade and a half remains the greatest creative period of constitutional thought in all of American history: never again did the country’s thinkers achieve such brilliance. Nor has the meaning of the term influence been fully understood. Influence is as often indirect as direct and more subtle than obvious. The concepts of governance contained in the six seminal documents served not only as models for foreign constitutionalists and but also as catalysts, motivating them to reconsider their options. Carl J. Friedrich, a distinguished xii Preface political scientist, described American influence best when he observed that “American constitutionalism’s greatest impact occurred not by having American institutions taken over lock, stock, and barrel, but by stimulating men into thinking out the various alternatives confronting them.”3 Evidence for tracing influence may be found in a wide range of sources: the transnational history of ideas, foreign translations of American constitutional documents, records of foreign constitutional conventions, writings of major thinkers abroad who publicized American ideas, and exchanges between American constitutionalists and their foreign counterparts . But such sources raise a recurring problem: how to distinguish the influence of American precedents from that of other constitutional practices . At what point, for example, does resemblance indicate not influence but a simple parallelism? Given the absence of written records in many instances, it is difficult to discover precisely how American ideas and institutions shaped directly or indirectly the constitutionalisms of other countries. Nonetheless, with careful analysis, it is possible to determine with a fair degree of accuracy where such influence occurred. Viewing American constitutionalism from a perspective outside of American history and as an extension of European history is one way of overcoming the parochial and nationalistic tendencies of some American scholars.4 To approach the study from this viewpoint, as William H. McNeill , the eminent world historian, reminds us, is not to diminish but to enrich it: Looking at the history of this nation as part of a larger process of European expansion may seem calculated to deprive the United States of its uniqueness. But appropriately moderated to recognize both differences and uniformities, it seems . . . this perspective provides a far more adequate and comprehensive vision of our past than anything older nationalistic histories of liberty and prosperity had to offer. It puts the United States back into the world as one of a family of peoples and nations similarly situated with respect to the old centers of European civilization.5 This call for a broader perspective may help prevent the provincialism that has sometimes led to an overemphasis on American exceptionalism: the idea that America is unique, distinctive, and fundamentally different from Europe and the rest of the world. American constitutionalism has always been part of the much larger tradition called Western constitutionalism. Composed of a combination Preface xiii of Britain’s long constitutional heritage, America’s quasi-independent constitutionalism, and France’s novel constitutionalism emerging from the French Revolution, this constitutional cohort held sway throughout much of the Western world for more than two centuries. Although modern Western constitutionalism developed during America’s revolutionary era, it was an...