part vii • legal history and legal science • dag michalsen 338 brought considerable external funding. It is no secret that until then the Stand der Forschung among both lawyers and historians had been tipped heavily in favour of methodological nationalism, whether the lawyer’s Norwegian constitutional law or the historian’s Norwegian constitutional and political history; now, though, external funders were interested in promoting the contemporary political aim of interpreting constitutional history as a legitimation of the purpose of the present Constitution recently inserted in a new Art. 2, ‘Democracy, rule of law and human rights.’ However, constitutional history is not about meeting constitutional aims. This is the well-known issue of what kind of normative claims should guide research on sensitive issues, such as modern constitutional history or the recent history of international law. First, though, a well-known story: the Norwegian Constitution of 17 May 1814 was conceived in the tradition of the constitutions of the US after 1776 and the French constitutions of the 1790s.19 Thus, it was perhaps the last of the typically revolutionary constitutions, signed just before the French Constitution of July 1814, and complete with every revolutionary feature: the unequivocal principle of the sovereignty of the people, the division of power based on that sovereignty, the catalogue of human rights, and, finally, the king’s right to veto legislation deliberately made only suspensive.This ideological dimension has been instrumental in the impression of the constitution as liberal. In Norwegian historiography, even when viewed with a critical eye, the history of the Norwegian constitution has been portrayed as teleological, even par excellence, as a history of the steady rise of national and political freedoms, an interpretation that is re-enacted every year in nationwide celebrations. Confronted with this well-known national constitutional and political narrative, it was important to the research team to revisit the ideological layers of past national interpretations with a view to rewriting the story in a less cultural-normative light than was traditional. Five general methodological aspects of this research stood out. How could one estab19 For the variety and quantity of constitutions, see Horst Dippel (ed.), Constitutions of the World from the late 18th Century to the middle of the 19th Century, i (Munich: Saur, 2005–); see also Holmøyvik & Gammelgaard 2015.
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