This is probably not the most important topic to get back to now that I’m at the keyboard again, but I’ve been fascinated by the debate about Calhoun that has taken place in TAC‘s (virtual) pages. Scott Galupo touched on the topic in February, and last week Daniel McCarthy returned to it with a fascinating post on Willmoore Kendall and his views of Calhoun’s political thought.

What I’m interested in is separating three questions. One is a political science question about optimal constitutional design. A second question relates to the nature of the American constitution specifically – what the ratifiers thought they were doing and how that understanding evolved among the American people over time. And a third question relates to the specific sectional conflict that afflicted the American republic – over slavery.

Without getting too far into the weeds, it’s pretty clear that, whatever the ratifiers intended, by the 1850s the constitutional understanding that obtained in much of the South was different from that which obtained elsewhere in the country. The South’s self-consciousness as a distinct society with distinct interests was not matched by a similar self-consciousness in, say, the Midwest – and there was a sense of common interest between Southern states like Georgia and North Carolina that transcended any abstract notion of state sovereignty. The states that ultimately seceded felt that preservation of their way of life required a giving them a functional veto over certain national policies. Preservation of the Union would require an asymmetrical relationship between the sections.

Is that inherently wrong, or inherently bad constitutional design? I don’t see why we should conclude that. Consider the gentle giant to our north. Canada is a confederation rather than a unitary state, and the provinces retain very substantial powers – larger powers, in many ways, than American states. But one of those provinces – Quebec – has, for at least a generation, understood itself as a “distinct society” with rights and powers that other provinces lack because of that distinction (most prominently, the right to maintain the formal primacy of a single language – French – as against the functional primacy of English and formal bi-lingualism that obtains elsewhere in Canada). The Meech Lake Accord and subsequent Charlottetown Accord were failed attempts to forestall Quebec secession by constitutionally formalizing this asymmetric relationship.

I call them failed attempts because the accords were rejected. But they succeeded in the sense that Quebec has not moved on to pursue secession. The constitutional issue hasn’t been resolved, but neither has it been brought to a head. Ultimately, formal resolution of these constitutional questions will likely require acceptance of some degree of asymmetry. But it’s not clear how vital it is that these questions be resolved, as opposed to continuing to muddle through with constitutional disagreement.

A similar debate obtains with respect to devolution in the UK – the West Lothian Question is what it’s known as over there. Now that Scotland has its own Parliament to legislate matters peculiar to Scotland, why should Scottish MPs get to vote on exclusively English matters in Westminster? Right now, the situation is asymmetric – Scotland has rights that England lacks. But ready-to-hand solutions are potentially risky in terms of the integrity of the Union. For example, if Scottish MPs were barred from voting on English matters, it would more deeply entrench a sense that Scotland was no longer integral to the Union. If a separate English Parliament were set up, meanwhile, that would be a huge boost to English (as opposed to British) nationalism.

What, I’m curious, would be Kendall’s views of these matters? Because it seems to me that the constitutional difficulties of Britain and Canada reflect genuinely difficult-to-negotiate asymmetries that exist on the ground, and that therefore we should have a certain amount of respect for “creative” constitutional arrangements (or for mere muddling-through) that might not pass muster in terms of democratic theory. (The same might be said for the existence of the U.S. Senate, which grants a coalition of small states an effective veto, and would therefore, I should think, be as incompatible with self-government as any other such minority veto – and yet this institution was bequeathed to us from the Philadelphia Solons themselves.)

The American Republic came to the point of civil war not merely because compromise was difficult but because of the gravity of the question at issue. The South’s aim in initiating hostilities was not merely to secure their sovereign rights but to secure the continuation of their slaveholding society in perpetuity. Quite apart from their desire to preserve the Union, many in the North understood that aim to be incompatible with their own flourishing as a free republic. Nothing similar can be said about either an independent Scotland or Quebec, should either come to pass, nor about an asymmetric constitutional arrangement that preserves the British or Canadian unions, should one come to be resolved.