Constitution Check: Is there a chance that the “Little England” idea will cross the Atlantic?
Lyle Denniston, the National Constitution Center’s constitutional literacy adviser, looks at more talk of secession in England and the concept of a perpetual union.
THE STATEMENTS AT ISSUE:
“After unexpected political charisma and cunning propelled him to another term as Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron will now need every ounce of those skills to avoid going down in history, with an altogether different title: founding father of Little England. A result that maintained the status quo at 10 Downing Street masked the dramatic transformation roiling Britain, ones that threaten to leave the country more isolated that at any time in its modern history.”
– Washington Post reporters Griff Witte and Dan Balz, writing from London on May 10, commenting on the prospect of disunion between England and Scotland – two communities of people that have been one since 1603 – and potential departure of Britain from the European Union.
“Suddenly, a vision of a different future has opened up [in Britain], especially for a certain kind of English Tory. Without dour, difficult, left-wing Scotland, maybe they could rule the rest of what used to be Great Britain, indefinitely. For U.S. readers who find the significance of this hard to understand: Imagine that a Texan secessionist party had, after years of campaigning, just taken every Texan seat in Congress. And now imagine that quite a few people in the rest of the country – perhaps in the Democratic Party – had, after years of arguing back, finally begun to think that Texan secession really might not be so bad and were beginning to calculate the electoral advantage accordingly.”
– Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, writing on the op-ed page on May 11 under the title “The end of Britain as we now it.”
“Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the Union, and to do so would protect its citizens’ standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and benefits of our founding fathers, which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.”
– Excerpt from a petition by a group of Texas residents, filed with the White House site that invites such requests from citizens:, “We the People: Your voice in our government.” This petition ultimately drew nearly 126,000 signatures. The White House did not embrace the idea, answering that “the founders established a perpetual union.”
WE CHECKED THE CONSTITUTION, AND…
When America broke off from mother country England, the new nation did not abandon all of the legal norms of its parent. It retained very much of the common law, the foundation of the Western legal tradition. But not everything English, in a government sense, came across the Atlantic, then or since.
Most important, the sovereignty of kings was replaced by the sovereignty of the people. And the hierarchy of English cultural life was replaced by a society that would become more fluid, with far less rigid lines between classes and considerably more democratic.
In forming a new union, the founding generation added another distinctly American notion to the science of government. The nation they were creating was to be a “perpetual union.” In fact, the very first attempt at creating a national government, in 1777, was formally titled “the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union,” and the commitment to the stability of the new union was mentioned repeatedly in that document.
And, when the new Constitution was adopted in 1787, that commitment was kept. The basic document said in its opening phrase that it had been crafted “in order to form a more perfect union” – perfected, but still the same union.
Of course, England had demonstrated by that time that it, too, could form and maintain a unified nation. By the late 18th Century, England and Scotland had been united under one royal crown for nearly three centuries. And it was 1922, and a war of independence, before a substantial part of Ireland broke away from the union. The long continuity of a united England, though, was as much a matter of convenience among the princes of the realm as of binding legal commitment.
The election this month in Britain has raised again the question of disunion on that side of the Atlantic. Perhaps many in England and Scotland accepted that there was a strong distaste for secession after the September 18 referendum in Scotland, when more than 55 percent of the people who voted cast ballots that said No to this question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?”
But the surprising sweep last week of nearly all of the Scottish seats in the British Parliament by the separation-minded Scottish National Party has reopened the issue of disunion. And, unlike the constitutional situation that is settled in America, that is still an issue that remains a potentially viable option. It does so simply because it is a matter of choice, not of law.
It is true, to be sure, that the “perpetual union” that exists among the United States was established with finality only after a Civil War, when one part of the nation, believing it necessary to protect a distinct way of life, declared that it was leaving the union. Still, it was not just military victory by the Northern forces that, once again, solidified the union.
That would come, as a constitutional matter, when the Supreme Court declared in the 1869 decision in Texas v. White that the states were permanently bound together in “an indestructible union.” Texas and the other states had engaged in rebellion, the court obviously acknowledged, but they had never left the union. They had temporarily lost the privileges of being in the union, but they had never forfeited their membership in it, the Justices declared. Once Congress recognized their post-war governments, they were fully back in the union with all of the privileges.
Thus, if there is any notion among some disaffected people in America to look for inspiration to what the Scots are now seriously pondering, there is a Constitution standing in the way of that happening here.