Revolutionary Constitutions and Their Constitutionalism: The Internalisation of Fear as Process and the Performance of Crisis in the Service of Stability¹

Constitutions are studied as rational expressions of political calculus aligned in time, space, and place. But constitutional emergence from the womb of conflict is born in emotion -anger, vindication, joy, and faith in a shared future. There is a semiotics of constitutional emotion; and a connection between the semiotics of constitutive emotion and constitutional text -as norm and form. It is the state and profundity of that emotion, perhaps more than the calculus of rational governance, that propels a people to statehood, and statehood to take its particular form. The state of emotion must be maintained, honoured, and performed, if it is to carry the state forward from the moment of its emergence, through the long period of time when the founding generation, and their emotional imaginaries are long dead, and the context in which that emotion was felt and understood become incomprehensible outside of its time. It is to the preservation of that emotional explosion, and its alignment with core constitutional text, that constitutions devote time and effort, usually in its preambular text, and sometimes in extraconstitutional documents with quasi-constitutional significance. If powerful enough, the emotive semiotic of constitutional explosion can affect not just its political community but those of other political communities looking for a way to rationalise and direct their own collective political emotion. This contribution examines three distinct but powerful instances of emotive semiotics shaping collective constitutional meaning-making. The first is that of the US Constitution; the second is that of the People’s Republic of China (1949); the third is that of the Republic of Cuba (1976). Each expresses anger-driven clusters of emotion with constitutive effect but forms very different starting and ending points. Each textualises that anger differently -the United States in its extra-constitutional Declaration of Independence; the Chinese in their preambular documents as well as in the constitution of the Communist Party of China; and the Cubans in their preambular text with a connection to other textual memorialisations of emotion. The contribution is organised as follows. First a brief theoretical introduction to the manifestation of a semiotics of constitutional emotion. Second, a deeper analysis of the signification of preambular and extraconstitutional text as memory and as an intensification of direction with respect to constitutional framing and interpretation. The contribution ends with an examination of the effects of differences in time, space, and place on this semiotic performance. The focus will be on the way that emotive context -a revolution to preserve traditional values; a communist revolution within a multi-state imperial power; and a revolution with a long fuse grounded in anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism.