For any state to achieve a sense of order and identity, it requires a shared set of values to be recognized and accepted by its subjects. Such values tend to be instilled by a system of fundamental laws and principles, and upheld by parliaments, courts, and other institutions established to maintain and reinforce them. This notion of shared membership, of collective rights and responsibilities as common to commercial companies and supranational organizations such as the European Union (EU) as to organs of any individual government is known as a ‘constitution’.
Constitutions come in all shapes, sizes, and formats. They can be formal or informal, long or short, absolute or merely advisory. Most signifi cant, though, is the difference between the two broad types of constitution adopted by individual states: written and unwritten. Of course, for any set of ideas related to one’s citizenship of a state to be communicated and sustained effectively, some kind of written record will need to exist. Yet there is an important distinction between constitutions described as ‘written’ and ones that are not. All constitutions of any worth comprise elements that have been written in a literal sense—for example, laws or decrees laid down in documentary form. But this does not make them ‘written constitutions’ per se. Written constitutions are, rather, codifi ed frameworks: single manuscripts summarizing the rights, values, and responsibilities attached to membership of the states to which they relate.
For historical reasons, some states have adopted written constitutions while others have not. Although this is not universally the case, written constitutions have tended to emerge in countries where there has been a sudden change in the entire system of government caused by a political upheaval such as a war, invasion, or revolution. This was certainly the case for two of the nations with whom the term is perhaps most closely associated: France and the USA. France’s constitution derives from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on 26 August 1789 by the National Constituent Assembly convened in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and later amended to enshrine the three abiding principles of ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’. The USA adopted its equivalent a decade after declaring independence from Britain, on 17 September 1787, at a landmark constitutional convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, addressed by the Enlightenment philosopher Benjamin Franklin.
