Cultural trauma and constitution: Precursors of political traditions and collective identities

Abstract

ABSTRACT The sociology of constitutions is a rather new domain. This paper adds to the legal and political literature on national constitutions and their effects on political traditions and collective identities by using the theory of cultural trauma. Using cultural sociology's analyses of national trauma, it demonstrates that the meaning of national constitutions and their particular articles become clear when juxtaposed with the narratives of trauma that national leaders eternalised in their stories of constitution. Close scrutiny of the constitutions of the USA, France, Italy, Croatia, Poland and Ukraine shows that beneath the legal jargon and the distinct political worldviews of modern national constitutions lay constitutive national traumas. Those national traumas motivated constitutional authors to make sure that those traumas will never recur. In so doing they charted particular political destinies and created unique collective identities.