part vii • legal history and legal science • dag michalsen 340 not mean that a constitution’s national history is irrelevant, but in a Norwegian research context it seemed important to establish the constitution as a specific normative entity decoded of its national qualities, making it one of hundreds so to speak. However, this process of denationalizing a constitution through the lenses of generic entity meant at the same time re-temporalizing it, in the sense of giving the constitution as a historical normative entity another temporality than that of the nation. In order to achieve this we are back at a more liberated and perhaps a more radical international interpretation of constitutions. Third, this leads to comparative and social perspectives on the history of constitutional law. Any constitutional history of modern time would take into account the new understandings of the concept of ‘constitution’ that emerged in the decades around 1800. As far as both form of the constitution and legal content of the constitution were concerned, constitutions became, in many respects, uniform, and functioned as international genres or models for the drawing up of constitutions around the world. This has been well documented in several large-scale constitutional history projects. In Norway, the new constitution of 17 May 1814 was part of a complicated constitutional network that by then consisted of constitutions around the world. In addition, the Constitutional Assemblywere familiar with a number of them, actively considering them when framing the text. Any constitutional history must consider this premise. This may be studied in detail – at any time. To continue the 1814 story, the history of constitutional theory and practice reveals connections between a variety of constitutional rules and mechanisms of the 1814 Constitution and a number of earlier constitutions, in particular the ones linked to a specific liberal ideological constitutionalism. To interpret the 1814 Constitution historically and comparatively involves studying the constitutions that its framers at Eidsvoll explicitly used as models as well as the ones that were discarded or not even known. The historical significance of the 1814 Constitution – or any constitution – will only become clear by understanding the complex comparative web of constitutions: its historical genealogy, technical character, and ideological outlook.
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