On a chilly day in late November 1989, Zdenĕk Janíček, dressed in grimy overalls, rose to address a rally of his fellow Prague brewery workers. Janíček and his listeners were among the several million in Czechoslovakia who had walked off their jobs in a two-hour general strike that had brought the country to a standstill. They were demanding not higher wages and improved working conditions but more democracy and an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power. In his speech, Janíček quoted from America’s Declaration of Independence. There in Prague, thousands of miles away and more than two...

America’s six founding documents were viewed from a global perspective right from the start. The Declaration was addressed, after all, to the whole world as well as to the American people. Jefferson’s prescient claim in his famous deathbed letter in 1826 established its global import: “[The Declaration is] an instrument, pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world.”¹ America’s first state constitutions included concepts that entered immediately into the discourse of the transnational history of ideas. The Articles of Confederation were taken seriously by both French constitutional thinkers and members of the Opposition in the British Parliament. That...

“The ‘shot heard round the world’ sounded sharp and clear in the Gardens of the Tuileries,” wrote one scholar.¹ The first echo of American constitutionalism abroad reverberated through countries bordering the northwest corner of the Atlantic basin and their central European hinterlands. Within the North Atlantic Basin, constitutional ties developed quickly between America and Europe as well as across the English Channel. A new awareness of this phenomenon is found in the current trend of reconceptualizing British and North Atlantic history inspired by Bernard Bailyn. Instead of a nationalistic perspective of events, a pan-Atlantic approach is taken. “We are all...

The second “echo” sounded in Latin America when Europe’s revolutionary upheavals reached across the Atlantic and influenced Spanish American colonists who began their movement to independence with Venezuela’s declaration in 1811. Inspired by the example of British American colonists to the North, they, too, threw off the control of European monarchs. The second echo was enormous in its original dimensions. In terms of space, Spanish America stretched from the San Francisco region to Buenos Aires and included some of the Caribbean islands. When Brazil, part of the Portuguese empire, became a republic in 1891, Latin America became the greatest laboratory...

A long interlude separated the two echoes of the shot heard round the world: the era of the American and French revolutions and the European revolutions of 1848. Though continuing, the influence of American constitutionalism did not have as much effect as before. Three distinctive periods of Western constitutionalism mark this interlude. The first was the period when Napoleon ended the French Revolution with his coup d’état, created a new constitution that established a facade of parliamentary institutions at home, and introduced modernizing administrative decrees throughout much of western Europe. The second was the age of Metternich, which sought to...

Writing from Europe where he was serving as minister to England in early March 1848, George Bancroft, the historian-diplomat, observed, “Our republic is teaching Europe to do the same. Of the six great civilised States, two now are republics: and more will follow.”¹ Two weeks later, on the eve of the European revolutions of 1848, he wrote: “Has the echo of American Democracy which you now hear from France, and Austria, and Prussia and all Old Germany, no power to stir up the hearts of the American people to new achievements?”² The third “echo” of American constitutionalism abroad, the European...

European history from 1850 to 1900 may be divided arbitrarily into two periods concerning the influence of American constitutionalism. During the first period, 1848 to 1865, Europe was coping with the effects of two momentous events: the 1848 revolutions and the American Civil War. In the second period, from about 1860 to 1900 (with some overlap), Europe witnessed a great burst of nationalism.¹ Nationalist movements precipitated by the French Revolution, Napoleon’s domination of Europe, Metternich’s regimes, and the 1848 European revolutions in the first half of the century resulted in the rise of new nation-states in the second half. Various...

The fourth “echo” of American constitutionalism resounded with the Spanish-American War in 1898, after which the United States strode like a colossus across the world stage to become an imperial power. Winning the war meant acquiring the Philippines and Puerto Rico and ultimately the Hawaiian Islands and the Samoan archipelago, thus becoming a major presence in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Never before in world history had an imperialist nation risen so far so fast as the United States did between 1776 and 1900.¹ With these possessions, America burst its continental bonds and emerged as a truly global power....

The fifth “echo” occurred in the era after World War I when there was an outbreak of democracy in Europe. During this time when monarchies were transformed into republics, many resorted to using features of the American model, issuing declarations of independence, calling constitutional conventions, adopting written constitutions, and incorporating bills of rights in their charters. Besides the emergence of democracy, hopes ran high for peace in the coming new world order.

The Allied victory resulted in a burst of democracy not seen in Europe since 1848. Many conservative monarchies were swept away. Before World War I, there had been...

Speaking before a hushed House of Commons on the eve of the Battle of Britain, Churchill described in apocalyptic terms the stakes involved in World War II:

The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we stand up to him, all Europe may be free...

The seventh and last “echo” was distinguished by four major developments. The first was the remarkable surge of democracy that started sweeping the globe. Thirty countries changed from nondemocratic to democratic regimes from 1974 to 1989, doubling the number of democracies to almost sixty.¹ The second was the important role of American constitutionalism in that surge. Although American influence was usually more indirect than direct, the United States as a model was of the utmost significance. The third development was that the increase in the number of democracies tipped the balance so that the forces of democracy exceeded those of...

When formulating the principles of American constitutionalism and creating institutions to realize them, the founding fathers were well aware of their role as innovators. Their goal was to originate for their compatriots a workable and lasting system of republican government. But did they intend something more? Did they claim that they were writing for the world at large as well as for their fellow Americans? Did they invent ideas and institutions that they considered to be of universal importance for future ages as well as for their own time? Surely, many did.

Madison, seeking to rally support for the new...