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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2009
Introduction: strains and tensions in multinational federations
Towards the end of 1787 John Jay defended the new constitution of the United States in the following way:
Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs … who … have nobly established their general liberty and independence.
(Jay No. 2. 1961 [1788], p. 38)The long search for ‘republican remedies’ to the evident malaise of the Articles of Confederation led ultimately to federation, social pluralism and constitutionalism. But it is clear from a close analysis of the Federalist Papers that the enduring expression of the principles of constitutionalism which underpinned the new federal political system with such clarity and force were not constructed with a view to reconciling different nationalist demands. The constituent states of the young federation were not inhabited by people of different language, race and culture but by people of the same language, race and culture.
The first case in which the decision to create a modern federal rather than a unitary form of government was determined mainly by the desire successfully to accommodate distinct nationalist differences was the Canadian constitution established by the British North America Act (now the Constitution Act) in 1867.
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