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On peoples and constitutions, sovereignty and citizenship
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**DRAFT; please do not circulate or cite without author’s permission**
On peoples and constitutions, sovereignty and citizenship
Melissa S. Williams
Department of Political Science
University of Toronto
e-mail:
melissa.## email not listed ##
Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association
Chicago, September 2-5, 2004
Constitutions and peoples, sovereignty and citizenship: surely these things go together? Exercising their pouvoir constituant, people bind themselves together under a single order of law, transforming themselves into a people. In this act, the constitutional moment, they delegate to government the constituted power that rests, always and ultimately, on their shared sovereignty as a people. They recognize each other as citizens whose power and responsibility it is to maintain and defend the principles that form the bedrock of their agreement. They grant to themselves a bundle of rights against one another and against the government they have authored and authorized. As a sovereign people, constituted in self-prescribed law, they claim full authority to decide all matters that collectively concern them. This is an inspiring and uplifting story of democratic agency, rare though it may be as a story that citizens of actually existing countries can persuade themselves to believe. It certainly has a powerful hold on many citizens of the United States, who look back to the nation’s revolutionary beginnings and founding moment. Perhaps les enfants de la patrie continue to tell themselves such a story, struggling though they are to determine whether hijab-wearing schoolgirls are among their numbers. And no doubt the story resonates powerfully with citizens of countries that have had constitutional moments in more recent memory: Israel, or South Africa, or the Czech Republic, for example. Of course, in order to persuade themselves of such a story, citizens must find some way of blinkering their view so as to overlook the exclusions from peoplehood that were so often written into such moments, of which slavery is the most difficult to ignore in the American experience. In such cases, the story must be retold as an aspirational ideal that citizens must strive to reach in the future, or which was redeemed in subsequent constitutional moments such as the Civil War or the Civil Rights Era. Most countries with democratic constitutions, though, lack the advantage of a self-conscious constitutional moment. Canada, where I live, has a fairly well-functioning constitution, but has never had a grand constitutional moment in which “the Canadian people,” as a unity, expressed its will. Rather, Quebec and Aboriginal peoples were forcibly brought under the authority of the British crown, and this imposed authority was
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| | Authors: Williams, Melissa. |
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1
**DRAFT; please do not circulate or cite without author’s permission**
On peoples and constitutions, sovereignty and citizenship
Melissa S. Williams
Department of Political Science
University of Toronto
e-mail:
melissa.## email not listed ##
Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association
Chicago, September 2-5, 2004
Constitutions and peoples, sovereignty and citizenship: surely these things go together?
Exercising their pouvoir constituant, people bind themselves together under a single
order of law, transforming themselves into a people. In this act, the constitutional
moment, they delegate to government the constituted power that rests, always and
ultimately, on their shared sovereignty as a people. They recognize each other as citizens
whose power and responsibility it is to maintain and defend the principles that form the
bedrock of their agreement. They grant to themselves a bundle of rights against one
another and against the government they have authored and authorized. As a sovereign
people, constituted in self-prescribed law, they claim full authority to decide all matters
that collectively concern them.
This is an inspiring and uplifting story of democratic agency, rare though it may be as a
story that citizens of actually existing countries can persuade themselves to believe. It
certainly has a powerful hold on many citizens of the United States, who look back to the
nation’s revolutionary beginnings and founding moment. Perhaps les enfants de la patrie
continue to tell themselves such a story, struggling though they are to determine whether
hijab-wearing schoolgirls are among their numbers. And no doubt the story resonates
powerfully with citizens of countries that have had constitutional moments in more recent
memory: Israel, or South Africa, or the Czech Republic, for example. Of course, in order
to persuade themselves of such a story, citizens must find some way of blinkering their
view so as to overlook the exclusions from peoplehood that were so often written into
such moments, of which slavery is the most difficult to ignore in the American
experience. In such cases, the story must be retold as an aspirational ideal that citizens
must strive to reach in the future, or which was redeemed in subsequent constitutional
moments such as the Civil War or the Civil Rights Era.
Most countries with democratic constitutions, though, lack the advantage of a self-
conscious constitutional moment. Canada, where I live, has a fairly well-functioning
constitution, but has never had a grand constitutional moment in which “the Canadian
people,” as a unity, expressed its will. Rather, Quebec and Aboriginal peoples were
forcibly brought under the authority of the British crown, and this imposed authority was
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