scholarly journals CONSTITUTION-MAKING AS INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS.A Case Study of the 1980 Canadian Constitutional Negotiations

1969 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam D. McDonald

The Constitution Act, 1982 is a document that profoundly changed the Canadian political landscape. It brought home the highest law of the land; it provided Canadians a mechanism to change their Constitution; it created a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, entrenched within the Constitution, out of the reach of one government. Perhaps its most important legacies, however, are the seemingly permanent isolation of Quebec and the primacy of place in Canadian history it gave Pierre Trudeau. This paper will examine the constitutional history of Canada with a view to determining what made the 1980 negotiating sessions successful when the sessions that led to both the Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord were not. It is important, however, to note that the word “successful” is used in the sense that an agreement was reached. Unlike Meech and Charlottetown, the repatriated constitution did not have unanimity among the participants. The question that comes to mind is this: if the governments did not really agree in 1981, why was a Constitution ratified? More importantly, are there lessons that can be drawn from this agreement that can be applied to the failed accords of the Mulroney era?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
FREDERICK G. CROFTS

ABSTRACT Examining the understudied collection of costume images from Heidelberg Calvinist, lawyer, and church councillor Marcus zum Lamm's (1544–1606) ‘treasury’ of images, the Thesaurus Picturarum, this article intervenes in the historiography on sixteenth-century German national imaginaries, emphasizing the import of costume books and manuscript alba for national self-fashioning. By bringing late sixteenth-century ethnographic costume image collections into scholarly discourse on the variegated ways of conceiving and visualizing Germany and Germanness over the century, this article sheds new light on a complex narrative of continuity and change in the history of German nationhood and identity. Using zum Lamm's images as a case-study, this article stresses the importance of incorporating costume image collections into a nexus of patriotic genres, including works of topographical-historical, natural philosophical, ethnographic, cartographic, cosmographic, and genealogical interest. Furthermore, it calls for historians working on sixteenth-century costume books and alba to look deeper into the meanings of such images and collections in the specific contexts of their production; networks of knowledge and material exchange; and – in the German context – the political landscape of territorialization, confessionalization, and dynastic ambition in the Holy Roman Empire between the Peace of Augsburg and the Thirty Years War (1555–1618).


Author(s):  
Vijayashri Sripati

As an 18th century ‘standard of civilization,’ the Western liberal constitution has since been integral to public international law and colonial trusteeship. This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the ostensible purposes why international organizations have internationalized this Constitution: from the League of Nations in Danzig, to the UN starting from Libya in 1949, and from 1989-2018, in more than forty poor states including most recently in Colombia and The Gambia. This pioneering study sets the Constitution’s internationalization via United Nations Constitutional Assistance (UNCA) at centre-stage. The Constitution’s salience makes its post-1989 rise via UNCA the most significant post-Cold War development, one which has spawned and shaped all other legal and political developments. For example, the internationalization of this Constitution (subsumed under the ‘rule of law’ label) drives the famed post-1989 rule of law movement, shaping all sectors from electoral, judicial, security, and parliamentary to international criminal and transitional justice. This Constitution’s internationalization is traced, from France’s drafting of Turkey’s 1856 monetary laws, British lawyer, Travis Twiss’ drafting of Congo’s 1885 constitution to the constitutional assistance offered by the League of Nations during the inter-war period and from 1949, by its successor, the United Nations and through a combined historical international constitutional framework, UNCA’s legitimacy is appraised. Through this new constitutional history of trusteeship, Sripati demonstrates that creating an equitable order requires considering seriously why sovereign states’ constitution-making is being internationalized. The book concludes by arguing that UNCA continues its trusteeship role. UNCA makes a new fiscally oriented addition to the ‘standards of civilization’: ‘transparent, inclusive and participatory’ constitution-making.


2010 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 881-886
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dale

In history, perspective is everything. Given that, I should make it clear from the start that I approached Mark deWolfe Howe's history of the First Amendment and church–state relations as a historian who studies constitutions and constitution-making, and more specifically as a historian of constitutions who has written about how and why we do constitutional history. Viewing it from that perspective, I must admit I have mixed feelings about this book.


Author(s):  
Odile Moreau

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Jessica Moberg

Immediately after the Second World War Sweden was struck by a wave of sightings of strange flying objects. In some cases these mass sightings resulted in panic, particularly after authorities failed to identify them. Decades later, these phenomena were interpreted by two members of the Swedish UFO movement, Erland Sandqvist and Gösta Rehn, as alien spaceships, or UFOs. Rehn argued that ‘[t]here is nothing so dramatic in the Swedish history of UFOs as this invasion of alien fly-things’ (Rehn 1969: 50). In this article the interpretation of such sightings proposed by these authors, namely that we are visited by extraterrestrials from outer space, is approached from the perspective of myth theory. According to this mythical theme, not only are we are not alone in the universe, but also the history of humankind has been shaped by encounters with more highly-evolved alien beings. In their modern day form, these kinds of ideas about aliens and UFOs originated in the United States. The reasoning of Sandqvist and Rehn exemplifies the localization process that took place as members of the Swedish UFO movement began to produce their own narratives about aliens and UFOs. The question I will address is: in what ways do these stories change in new contexts? Texts produced by the Swedish UFO movement are analyzed as a case study of this process.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-159
Author(s):  
Young-Seok Seo ◽  
Bong-Seok Kim
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Kathryn M. de Luna

This chapter uses two case studies to explore how historians study language movement and change through comparative historical linguistics. The first case study stands as a short chapter in the larger history of the expansion of Bantu languages across eastern, central, and southern Africa. It focuses on the expansion of proto-Kafue, ca. 950–1250, from a linguistic homeland in the middle Kafue River region to lands beyond the Lukanga swamps to the north and the Zambezi River to the south. This expansion was made possible by a dramatic reconfiguration of ties of kinship. The second case study explores linguistic evidence for ridicule along the Lozi-Botatwe frontier in the mid- to late 19th century. Significantly, the units and scales of language movement and change in precolonial periods rendered visible through comparative historical linguistics bring to our attention alternative approaches to language change and movement in contemporary Africa.


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