We the People and the Others: The Co-founding of Democratic States

Hans Agné

The Constitutionalism Web-Papers from University of Hamburg, Faculty for Economics and Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science

Abstract: In democratic theory it goes without saying that people should establish their own politicalorders.1 Perhaps the most famous expression of this moral intuition is found in the preambleof the American constitution. By the opening phrase ‘we the people … establish thisconstitution’ the founders sent a message to revolutionary movements throughout the worldthat people may establish not only the rights and obligations that will regulate their public life,i.e. their own constitutions, but also the organisations which will exercise supreme power over the territories in which they live, i.e. their own states. However, the making of new states, ornew constitutions in existing states, sometimes involves people with no intention ofsubjecting themselves to the political orders that they seek to establish. The US-led impositionof new regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq is one example and the UN administration of postconflictsocieties in Kosovo and East Timor is another (Zaum 2007). Could such policies bereconciled with the idea that people should establish their own political orders?

Keywords: economics; democracy; law; diversity/homogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de/fachbereich-sowi/p ... 008/conweb4-2008.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erp:conweb:p0034

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Constitutionalism Web-Papers from University of Hamburg, Faculty for Economics and Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jan WILKENS ().