Introduction: The Politics of Constitutional Change

Abstract

Notwithstanding Machiavelli’s warning to the Prince who would embark on projects of constitutional change, and tamper with the basic political structures and rules of the game, many different countries have recently experienced attempts to amend or alter their constitutions. Constitution-making has preoccupied not only the leaders of new states or those which, like Germany after the Second World War, have undergone convulsive shifts in regime. Demands for change have also arisen with increasing frequency in a number of other advanced industrial societies whose basic political structures have been stable over long periods of time. Even the United Kingdom, long considered the classic example of institutional stability — without a formal written constitution and therefore without special rules for amending it — has in the last decade debated a wide-ranging set of constitutional conflicts and initiatives. As James Kellas reports, a ‘continuing agenda of constitutional reform … keeps reasserting itself’. Constitution-making may in many ways be an extraordinary political process, but it is by no means an uncommon one, and there are some indications that political debate focused on the underlying rules, assumptions, and institutions of the political regime is increasing.

It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones. The hesitation of the latter arises in part from the fear of their adversaries, who have the laws on their side, and in part from the general skepticism of mankind which does not really believe in an innovation until experience proves its value. So it happens that whenever his enemies have occasion to attack the innovator they do so with the passion of partisans while the others defend him sluggishly so that the innovator and his party are alike vulnerable.¹

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince