constitutions and codifications, 1667–2017 Any constitution is subject to transformative interpretations over time. In application, the hundreds of nineteenth-century constitutions were subject to dramatic reinterpretations as part of their political and social contexts. No constitution has a fixed historical quality. That would be a fundamentally anti-essentialist viewpoint. Since about 1980, the unceasing process of the nationalizing twentieth-century constitutions was replaced by a distinct internationalization. It would be wrong to view their general political and cultural qualities as being primarily an expression of the nation-state, though for they are now a means of realizing values that transcend national ones. This shift from nationalization to internationalization is apparent in the way international regimes of human rights supplement the civil rights sections of national constitutions – a historical insight that should not be overlooked. My fourth point is this. To grasp the complex legal structures that shaped the normative character of Norwegian constitutional history in the early nineteenth century, we must consider as wide a range of international material as possible. Perhaps that is self-evident. We can call it international normative acts – meaning treaties, constitutions, codifications, decrees, and the connected discourses that were international both in content and effect.22 Study of the close interactions between domestic constitutional-legal regimes (such as the Norwegian constitution of 1814) and external international legal regimes (such as the late and postNapoleonic treaty system) will reveal the international quality of a constitution like the Norwegian one. It is important to highlight the normative, connecting legal acts of international treaties and constitutions by systematically emphasizing their international dimension when making a constitution then or, as we now know, at any time since. We may call it a thick geopolitical history of international legal regimes that connects nations and geopolitical entities. It certainly seems worthwhile to interpret constitutions with a host of other legal devices that formed past international legal orders, understanding the different normative tools of the age (treaties, constitutions, codifications, and 22 See Dag Michalsen, ‘The International Dimensions of the Norwegian Constitution of 1814’, Scandinavica, International Journal of Scandinavian Studies (2015), 65–81. 341
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