Minority Groups and Secessionist Movements

Various chapters in this collection have also shed light on what the phenom­enon of founding moments in constitutionalism may mean for minority groups or secessionist movements around the world.

Lin’s chapter on Taiwan adds a fascinating dimension to this volume as it explains how Taiwan has used the 1947 founding moment and constitutional order of the PRC and interpreted it differently in order to create a separate Taiwanese constitutional identity. In doing so, his chapter points us to a potential weakness of founding moments in constitutionalism - it implies that founding moments and constitutions are so malleable that it may be interpreted in different, even contra­dictory ways. His chapter could also pave the way for future scholars to investigate how secessionist or nationalist movements have used the original constitution of former home state as a springboard for recalibrating a new national identity, instead of developing their own constitution. This chapter may help bring to the fore the important idea of how secessionist movements may adopt the founding moments of the country they separate from as part of their own revolutionary narrative, and ways in which separationist movements have been able to utilise the founding moment narratives of the state they used to be a part of in order to argue that their own independence is a continuation of that narrative.

This phenomena could also be studied at the intra-state level, where minority groups may use the founding moments narrative to legitimise their own struggle against the new state; although the country itself fought against the oppression of foreign colonisers, now ‘we’ - the minority group - continue that fight, but against the oppression of the majority.

Likewise, Noga Efrati’s chapter on the constitutional history of Iraq offers a gendered perspective of founding moments. She shows how one particular segment of society may view certain constitutions - or provisions within constitutions - as founding moments for their particular cause. She notes that most observers in 1958 ‘did not attach much importance to what seemed to be nothing more than generic articles promising Iraq’s citizens equity before the law’. ¹¹ However, from a gendered perspective, the 1958 move to include women in public life was a found­ing moment for women, although it may have gone unnoticed by others.

Efrati’s chapter opens the door to numerous questions regarding founding moments and minority groups. First, is an event a founding moment if only a subsection of society views it as a watershed moment or is it necessary that most of the society - if not all - view it as a founding moment? To use another example, should the reconstruction amendments in the US - which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude - be seen as a founding moment for one subsection of the American population or for everyone in the US?

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