part vii • legal history and legal science • dag michalsen 342 other new forms of regulations) as international legal acts, even though a constitution or a codification formally only applies to a specific state. By conducting this line of research, the so-called ‘international background’ of Norway’s international and constitutional history around 1814 ceases to be a mere backdrop and becomes integrated into the historical interpretations. My final and fifth tool with which to historize past constitutions is to contrast constitutions with states of emergency. Few constitutions have as stable a history as the Norwegian Constitution of 1814, a fact supported by its existence as a living document for two centuries. It shares this tangible stability with the constitutions of some other countries, but most other states have replaced entire constitutions through major government upheavals, at times at remarkable speed. Whether retaining an old constitution is preferable or not depends on the quality and character of the constitution, and its general political support. Perhaps Norway has not adopted a new constitution since 1814 because of a consensusorientated political elite and the constitutional ideologies that developed in the nineteenth century, and because the union with Sweden ended with its successful dissolution in 1905. The Norwegian Constitution was flexible enough to absorb, and not legally prevent, a remarkable transformation towards democracy and the welfare state that characterized peacetime Norway in the twentieth century. This narrative is what we may call the liberal rule of law perspective on Norway’s constitutional history. Theoretically, it is premised on the difference between normal and exemption, and on the liberal drive to juridify the right to the exception of executive power. International constitutional history has been the diametric opposite, as the difference between the normal and the exception (the state of emergency) has been dissolved. Historically, the Constitution of 1814 was created in war, under extraordinary circumstances, and later there were crises: the political fights over parliamentarianism at the end of the century, the dissolution of the union with Sweden in 1905, the interwar class struggles, and most of all the German occupation of Norway from 1940 to 1945.
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