Between parliament und government: the position of the President in the discussion about the new German Constitution (1918–19)

SUMMARY

In this article, Cristiana Scnigaglia analyzes how, when the constitution of the new German republic was being debated at Weimar in 1919, difficulties arose because there had been very little prior debate in Germany about a republican form of government, since the permanence of the monarchical system had been generally assumed. This gave great weight to the writings of Robert Redslob, the only senior academic authority who had discussed at some length the institution of a presidency in a republic. The article goes on to show how leading figures like Max Weber and Hugo Preuss, who were deeply involved in drafting the Weimar constitution, drew on Redslob's ideas in arguing for the solution that was eventually accepted, a State President directly elected by popular vote, who could act as a necessary constitutional balance by setting limits to the otherwise unlimited authority of the legislature and the central government.     

Reviews

Gary W, Cox: The Efficient Secret; The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in England (Cambridge University Press, 1987; pp. xiv, 187; ISBN 0 521 32779 2; £25.00) W. C. Lubenow: Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis; The British House of Commons in 1886 (Oxford University Press, 1988; pp. vii, 389; ISBN 0 19 822966 6; £37.50.)

W. R. McKay: Clerks in the House of Commons 1363–1989: A Biographical List [House of Lords Record Office Occasional Publications No. 3] (H. M. S. O., 1989, pp. 172; n.p)     

Parliament and the army in England 1659: Constitutional thought and the struggle for control

Summary

Thomas Secker, archbishop of Canterbury from 1758 to 1768, was one of the most notable Anglican bishops of the eighteenth century. This article traces his involvement with Parliament throughout his career. The shorthand notes he made of speeches he had heard between 1735 and 1743, which he wrote up afterwards, were used by William Cobbett in assembling his Parliamentary History of England. Secker was an able speaker in the Lords and possessed a vein of independence, judging each bill on its merits, sometimes voting with and sometimes against the Court. This independence weakened his standing with the king and ministry and resulted in his being left in the see of Oxford from 1737 until 1758, when the king at last spoke to him again. Secker strongly opposed the Pretender's rebellion of 1745, but he was not always successful in other causes he espoused, notably his support for the Jew Bill of 1753. His years as archbishop were dogged by ill health, although he remained a person of weight in the Upper House. These were years when the Church of England was on the defensive, with Convocation prorogued, and Seeker found himself in a straitjacket. However, his devotion to the Hanoverian succession and the Church never wavered.     

Legitimite et droit de resistance au xxe siecle: La conscience religieuse et la guerre civile espagnole

SUMMARY

In the early nineteenth century, English common law did not recognize absolute slavery within Britain's borders. Nevertheless, slavery did exist in a number of British colonies. In 1807, thanks to the impassioned efforts of the Anti-Slavery Society, the British Parliament made the slave trade illegal. The Slavery Abolition Bill was passed by both Houses of Parliament and it received royal assent on 29 August 1833, but it did not come into force until 1 August 1834. On that date slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire. Yet, despite this ban, there were many exceptions to its automatic application throughout the imperial possessions. A loyal servant of the Crown, the colonial judge Sir John Jeremie (1795–1841), conducted a personal campaign against slavery and racism in the colonies of the British Empire. His reflections, based on the reality of daily colonial life, offered a technical rather than doctrinaire contribution to the success of the anti-slavery cause. Jeremie was to pay a high price for his ideas, however, owing to deep-rooted prejudices and the strong economic influence of the powerful caste of slave traders. His Four Essays on Colonial Slavery was published in 1831. This work had considerable influence on British parliamentary debates, and it was strongly attacked by supporters of slavery. As a jurist and legal practitioner, during his cursus honorum (as lawyer, colonial judge and ultimately his appointment as Governor of Sierra Leone), Jeremie brought a practical perspective in writings to the debates which animated the Westminster Parliament, even after the approval of the Abolition Act. Despite the slave trade being abolished in the British Empire, slavery per se continued to be legal in some form for many decades to come. Hence, the issue of slavery continued to be a subject with which Jeremie was associated for the remainder of his life. Another interesting historical source is Jeremie's correspondence with Members of Parliament and the British government. This constitutes a lively exchange with London and testifies to the enlightened and progressive foreign policy vision of this active member of the Anti-Slavery Society. Sir John Jeremie was also interested in migration and integration-related issues, as can be seen from primary sources such as letters and dispatches. The wide variety of his correspondence bears testament to the battle he fought until his death.     

An Impeditive Administrative Culture? The Legacy of Australia's First Auditor‐General on the Australian Audit Office

This historical study provides an account of the Australian Audit Office from its formation in 1901 until the end of the term of Australia's first Auditor-General in 1925. The Audit Office was created to assist the Commonwealth Government in discharging and reporting on its accountability for the economical use of resources. The philosophy upon which the Audit Office was created was one based on small government where a minimalist role for the audit function was envisaged. Accordingly, the initial Audit Act dictated a detailed audit methodology. However, the expansion of Commonwealth activities due to the outbreak of the First World War, the realities of a decentralised Commonwealth administration and the more commercial activities of government created numerous problems for both the Office and government. The Auditor-General was unable, or unwilling, to adapt his audit methodologies to suit the changing circumstances of Australian public administration and the workload of the Audit Office periodically fell into backlog. Relations with the executive became strained over these matters prompting intervention by subsequent governments. This early period is important historically as it provides a window through which to view the development of the public sector audit function and its contribution to an efficient public sector. In addition, the events of this period illustrate the importance of relations between the Audit Office and the government, and the role of the Auditor-General in contributing to an efficient public administration.     

Reviews

Report to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. By the Supreme Allied Commander, South‐east Asia, 1943–45, Vice‐Admiral the Earl Mountbatten of Burma. London : H.M. Stationery Office. Pp. xii+280. 39 maps. 1951. 17s. 6d.

Before the Curtain. By Thomas Preston. John Murray. 18s.

Anopheles and Malaria in the Middle East. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Memoir No. 7. By Leeson, Lumsden, Yofe and Macan. London : H. K. Lewis and Co. 1950. Pp. xii + 223. Illustrations. 35s.

The Essential T. E. Lawrence. Selected by David Garnett. Jonathan Cape.. 1951. 8"×5/1/2>”. Pp. 311. 12s. 6d.

Traveller's Prelude. By Freya Stark. John Murray. Pp. xii + 346. Illustrations. 1950. 18s.

Ceylon, Pearl of the East. By Henry Williams. Pp.460. Robert Hale. 1951. 25s.

The Hunt for the Buru. By Ralph Izzard. Pp. 176. Illustrated. Hodder and Stoughton. 15s.

Antique Land. By Diana Shipton. Hodder and Stoughton. Pp. 219. Photographs. 1950. 20s.

Journey to Red China. By Robert Payne. Heinemann, 8s. 6d.

Confessions of a China Hand. By Ronald Farquharson. Hodder and Stoughton. Pp. 224. 12s. 6d.

Lushai Chrysalis. By Major Anthony Gilchrist McCall, O.B.E. Pp. 320. Photographs. Luzac and Co. 25s.     

The campaign against the Anglo‐Iranian agreement of 1919

The Anglo‐Iranian agreement of 1919 was a major turning point both in the modern history of Iran and in her relations with Britain. It was the brainchild of Lord Curzon and the Foreign Office in which the other British government departments eventually acquiesced with reluctance, although the government of India retained its opposition to it. It failed because of the fears it created for the loss of Iran's independence, mainly as a result of the secrecy with which it had been negotiated, and the rigidity with which it was upheld. A vigorous campaign was conducted against it by Iranians as well as the United States, France and Russia. Yet it might not have failed had India, the India office, the Treasury and the War Office provided the requisite instruments for its success. Its failure resulted in the 1921 coup, the rise of Reza Khan and the Pahlavi state, and a new chapter in Anglo‐Iranian relations.     

Ferrets in the Caribbean: Britain,Grenada and the Curious Case of the Armoured Cars

Abstract

When the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement seized power in Grenada in March 1979 they set about securing and defending their ‘revolution’ against the threat of a countercoup organised by the deposed Prime Minister Eric Gairy. Military aid was quick to arrive from expected allies, namely Cuba and Guyana. Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop also requested arms from Britain and the United States. The People’s Revolutionary Government’s (PRG’s) ties to Cuba and evasiveness over election plans ruled out the US providing any support. Britain remained more open-minded about the PRG’s intentions. Using recently declassified British government documents, this article will examine London’s deliberations over supplying armoured cars to Grenada. It argues that Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials focused on the bigger picture of steering the PRG away from Cuba at the cost of considering how the sale of the armoured cars to the PRG would appear to a wider audience and that the PRG’s increasingly authoritarian behaviour ultimately vetoed the sale.     

Minorities and the free press in Hungary after 1867

SUMMARY

The study analyses the status and the standard of freedom of the press in Hungary in the first decade of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Special attention is paid to libel cases against nationality papers attacking the government in Pest. The author's main purpose is to discuss the limits on the freedom of the press drawn by criminal law, and in addition, to examine the accusations against the oppositional papers and the court practices involved. As a result, the study emphasizes that the picture of ‘the press under a state of siege’ could hardly be verified from the criminal procedures examined. The author does not, however, paint an idealized picture of the freedom of the press. The government in Pest was biased against the nationality papers. Yet even so, in the first ten years of Dualism juries adjusted the official criminal law policy by acquittals of authors and editors. The prosecuting magistracy therefore accepted the independence of the jury and the unreliability of the lay judges, and often withstood the demands of government departments. The members of the government of Hungary accepted the practice instituted by the prosecuting magistracy and ‘instead of strict laws and even more strict courts’ they gave up trying to rule the press by means of the criminal law. The first half of the 1870s thus became a period of a free press, indicating to what extent the parliamentary system and its government in Dualism could ‘practise liberalism without risking its own existence’.     

The 1990 National Affairs Conference and the future of democracy in Taiwan

Abstract

In the last four decades Taiwan has made startling economic progress under the authoritarian rule of the Nationalist government, increasing its per capita Gross Domestic Product from about U.S. $50 in 1945 to about $8,000 in 1991. Politically, however, Taiwan has moved with great caution, reluctance, and conservativeness, maintaining martial law and ruthless militarist control until 1987. There was little real democratization although in those long years dissidents such as the tangwai (“outside the party” that is, outside the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang [KMT]) opposition fought valiantly, suffered enormously, and achieved some breakthroughs and softening of the Nationalist authoritarian rule.     

The work of the African Union Liaison Office in building peace on the ground: A case study of Madagascar

ABSTRACT

Field offices are an increasingly important reality in the architecture of African peacemaking. Yet despite their importance in practice, in academic debates on peacebuilding and mediation, little attention has so far been paid to their work. This paper analyses the role of the African Union Liaison Office in the international efforts to re-establish constitutional order after the 2009 political crisis in Madagascar. The paper scrutinises the mandate, set-up and institutional capacities of the liaison office and reconstructs how and to what extent it has contributed to peacemaking and conflict prevention in Madagascar. It thereby particularly highlights the often ad hoc way the liaison office reacted to unprecedented and rapidly changing events on the ground and stresses the important role played by individual staff members in translating the liaison office’s mandate into practice.     

ICHRPI/CIHAE newsletter

ABSTRACT

When the Assemblée Nationale Constituante (ANC) adopted the first French constitution, delegates composed 11 articles whose purpose was to guide and govern the behaviour of members in a future legislative assembly. Procedures in three of these articles required that a bill receive three readings during its progress through the assembly. Beginning with works of René Descartes (1637) and Galileo Galilei (1638), I located sources for procedures that guide and govern the work of law-makers, applying their reasoning to the process of legislation. I explain how investigators went about identifying variables that captured conditions of possible experience. Narrowing my focus to three articles in the 1791 constitution, I extracted variables pertinent to the three readings of a bill, along with the permissible range of values that the text of these articles assigned to each variable. An Excel 3D Surface chart presents procedural choices which were available to French delegates to the Assemblée Nationale Constituante, the body responsible for drafting the 1791 constitution. The Excel chart is based on arrays of variables and the values assigned from the text of these three articles; these are located in Section II Tenue des Séances et Forme de Délibérer / Conduct of Meetings and Form of Deliberation’.     

How to avoid a coup d'état: The Federalist on the American constitution

SUMMARY

In this article Jack Pole considers whether the Constitution of the United States, as drafted in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 could be regarded as the result of a coup d'état, since the original remit of the Convention had been to modify the existing Confederation of independent states, while the outcome was a constitution for a new sovereign, federal state. The article is based on the use of the collection of essays that were later published collectively as The Federalist to illustrate the thinking of the Convention leaders. It is important that The Federalist was not a work of political theory, but a collection of the ideas of Hamilton, Madison and Jay, which were written in response to developments with the aim of persuading the public to vote for ratification. The central problem for the authors was to balance their wish for a strong central government against the widespread contemporary belief, rooted in Whig thinking, that a strong central government was the most dangerous of all threats to individual liberties. The authors, collectively ‘Publicus’, begin with an orthodox view of sovereignty as ‘indivisible’: but this view was modified in face of strong Anti-Federalist attacks on ‘consolidation’. Key issues were open to later judicial interpretations. The article suggests that, quite apart from the complete absence of armed coercion on the Convention of 1787, the results of its deliberation cannot be seen as the result of any kind of coup.     

The grundgesetz after 50 years: Analysing changes in the German constitution

Fifty years after its original drafting, the German constitution has seen its text amended many times. Indeed, among OECD countries, the Grundgesetz has one of the highest rates of constitutional change. This article analyses these changes. It does so in a quantitative manner in its first section, before proceeding to ask how the numerous changes can be explained. Three approaches from the legal and political science literature are presented: one emphasising historical‐structural factors, one analysing changes as constitutional revisionism, and an institutional approach which focuses on the conditions for constitutional amendment. The strengths and weaknesses of each approach are then compared and contrasted, before the article concludes with an assessment of the characteristics of German constitutional policy.     

Alexandre 1er et le regime representatif

Summary

Alexander I and Representative Government

This analysis of the attitudes of Alexander I towards representative government is based on fifty years of work on Russian political history, and in particular on a study of the international organization of the post‐Napoleonic peace and, more recently, the reign of Alexander I.

In the light of recent events in Russia, this essay suggests some obvious comparisons between Alexander I and Gorbachev. Both wanted to liberalize the government of their empire without damaging the legitimacy of the new institutions to be created with respect to the existing regime. Both were thrown out of power, the former to put a stop to reforms, the latter to speed them up, at the risk of destroying the legitimacy of the central authority over the various parts of the empire.     

America and the Peace Talks

Abstract

During the ‘cleaning house’ period of a new administration, we are usually barraged with predictions of how all the changes will affect policy. New appointees and their past records are carefully scrutinized by the prognosticators. Such is the case with the newly chosen implementers of American Vietnam strategy. Henry Cabot Lodge is noted for his unbending anti-Communism. Henry Kissinger comes through as the hard-nosed intellectual with new, realistic solutions for the Vietnam dilemma. Ellsworth Bunker is the behind-the-scenes diplomat deferring punctiliously to Saigon's grievances. And yet what is most striking after two months of transition and new faces added to or replacing the old, is that the political climate in Washington and Paris and the traditionally defined objectives of American policy in Asia are basically unchanged. Looking at the resumption of the Peace Talks in Paris, it is already clear that basic American assumptions — and not personalities — will determine the American position in the months ahead.     

Petitioning in early seventeenth-century Scotland, 1625–51

ABSTRACT

In contrast to recent work on England and other parts of Europe, research on petitioning in early modern Scotland is still in its early stages, notably in respect of its political significance in a comparative context. This article investigates supplicatory activity in Scotland during a crucial period in which the petition came under intense scrutiny. The 1630s saw a determined attempt by King Charles I’s Scottish government to clamp down on the use of supplications to express criticism of royal policy; assertive, but carefully controlled, petitioning was one part of a resistance strategy that resulted in the downfall of the king’s regime. When a new government came to power in 1638 headed by the Covenanters, petitioning activity came to be seen as a potential challenge to their authority. Petitioning does not appear to have invoked ‘opinion’ in 1640s Scotland as has been claimed for England; the printed petition remained a rarity in Scotland. Nevertheless constitutional reform, combined with the wartime conditions of the 1640s, generated more recourse to petitioning, and the government recognized opportunities to enhance its claims to legitimate rule. A preliminary investigation of everyday petitions to the government during the 1640s shows how the narratives constructed by supplicants often sought to endorse its values and ideals, but that this type of petitioning was also used by supplicants to critique the government’s policies and hold it to its own rhetoric.     

Politische Redekultur in der Vormoderne. Die Oratorik europäischer Parlamente in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit

SUMMARY

Procedural delaying tactics (Obstruktion), including filibustering, have been used by parliamentary minorities overwhelmed by large majorities supporting a government. English in origin, they were widespread in Europe by the turn to the twentieth century as a consequence of liberal interpretations of the right to freedom of speech. Apart from England and the United States, the practice was especially prevalent in Austria and Hungary. Barna Mezey examines this issue in Hungary from 1846 until 1939, reviewing the historical, constitutional and legal aspects of obstructive measures and the steps taken against them within a comparative context. The Hungarian manifestation may be divided into simple obstruction (filibustering for several hours per speaker, days for the whole operation), technical (procedural delays, for which frequent lengthy votes were needed), and violent forms such as shouting and the throwing of objects. Only in the last case did Hungarian Speakers not hesitate to take countermeasures, including summoning the police.

After the Dual Monarchy was established, the minority in the Hungarian parliament claimed that its blocking actions were justified as the Compromise of 1867 led the government of Austro-Hungary to pursue policies not in the national interest. The Hungarian parliament was divided between those favouring the dynasty's attempt to create a more unified kingdom and those adhering to the principles of 1848. The latter were deprived of the chance of ever achieving office by the powers granted to the monarch in the Compromise. They felt driven to employ delaying tactics in an organized manner from 1872 onwards, when a proposed change in voting criteria would have greatly restricted the franchise. Another major conflict from 1896 was over measures to reduce the influence of the Church on marriage and to widen freedom of religion, including that for the Jews. An attempt to impose more discipline on debates in 1904 led the opposition to destroy all the furnishings of the debating chamber and precipitated the fall of the government. In 1912 the Speaker, acting for the government, used the police to remove the opposition from the chamber and push through a law introducing a two-year term for military service and other army reforms. Legislation at that time also prohibited procedural delaying measures, and in 1928 severe restrictions were placed on filibustering. The author also analyses the debate at the time among legal experts over the validity of these tactics, at the heart of which lay disagreements on the nature and limits of freedom of speech.