Socio-Economic Rights Versus Social Revolution? Constitution Making in Germany, Mexico and Ireland, 1917–1923
| Author | Thomas Murray |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663915578186 |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2015, Vol. 24(4) 487–508
Socio-Economic Rights
ª The Author(s) 2015
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Versus Social Revolution?
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663915578186
Constitution Making in
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Germany, Mexico and
Ireland, 1917–1923
Thomas Murray
School of Politics and International Relations, UCD Dublin, Ireland; Institute of
Social Sciences and Humanities of the Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico
Abstract
Socio-economic rights are ethico-political claims to employment, social security, health,
education and adequate living standards, the understanding and contestation of which have
changed over time. In this article, I examine the first wave of attempts to constitutionalize
socio-economic rights in Mexico (1917), Weimar Germany (1919) and, in particular, the
Irish Free State (1922). The real politics of constitutionalizing socio-economic rights, I argue,
centred on a clash between popular, anti-systemic movements and governments’ attempts
to contain the ideals and practices of these movements. In all three cases, escalating popular
militancy spurred state constitution makers into proposing socio-economic rights as an
alternative to revolution. In the Irish Free State, however, the ruling class’ successful
containment – militarily, politically and ideologically – of social movements’ ideals and
practices ensured more conservative constitutional forms predominated, emphasizing
national identity and private property rights. The critical discourse analysis of the Irish
constitution-making process demonstrates the salience of both ‘national’ (core–peripheral)
and ‘social’ (capital–labour) relations in determining final constitutional forms of socio-
economic rights. For socio-economic rights advocates and scholars today, these findings
invite fresh reflection on the limits of claiming rights from the state in a capitalist society.
Corresponding author:
Thomas Murray, School of Politics and International Relations, UCD Dublin, Ireland.
Email: thomas.murray@ucdconnect.ie
488
Social & Legal Studies 24(4)
Keywords
Constitution, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, national, social and popular movements,
socio-economic rights, world-systems theory
Contemporary anti-capitalist struggles have reinvigorated debates on socio-economic
rights (Forbath, 2012; Langford et al., 2013; Young, 2012: 12). Historically, people’s
invocation of such rights typically involved an ethico-political claim to employment,
social security, health, education and adequate living standards, the understanding
of which has evolved over time. Today, following the South African example of the
1990s, social movements, governments and scholars increasingly debate constitutiona-
lizing socio-economic rights to provide judicial enforcement mechanisms to would-be
rights claimants. For the Right, constitutionalizing ‘welfare rights’ diminishes individual
initiative and distorts otherwise equilibrated markets (Cross, 2001). For the Left, socio-
economic rights may de-commodify life’s necessities and ensure a more egalitarian
society (Harvey, 2010: 253–259; Sunstein, 2004). Recent social movements in the world’s
city squares, from the Arab Spring through the Indignados to Occupy Wall Street, have
ruptured these traditional debates, questioning whether state-oriented, representative
politics can meet people’s basic needs and suggesting instead new modes of social
reproduction based on direct democracy and the creation of commons (Campagna and
Campiglio, 2012; Hardt and Negri, 2012; Holloway and Tischler, 2013).
The new movements provide alternative understandings of power, freedom and
democracy from which to view, among other things, the significance of earlier constitu-
tional forms (Graeber, 2013: 150). In this article, I aim to open a similarly critical per-
spective within contemporary socio-economic rights debates by presenting an analysis of
their constitutionalization the first time around. Specifically, I analyse the role of socio-
economic rights within both the state and popular constitutional forms that accompanied
the world revolutionary moment of ‘1917’ (see Elster, 1995: 368). The politics of con-
stitutionalizing socio-economic rights at this time, I suggest, is most usefully understood
as a clash between popular, anti-systemic movements in the ‘historical capitalist world
system’ and governments seeking to contain, coercively and ideologically, these move-
ment’s ideals and practices (see Arrighi et al., 2011). The outcome of these clashes var-
ied, crystallizing different configurations of ‘national’ (core–peripheral) and ‘social’
(capital–labour) relations in constitutional form and dictated the presence and effective-
ness of socio-economic rights in a state’s constitutional order.
To outline this explanatory framework in sufficient depth and, in particular, to illus-
trate the importance of both ‘core–peripheral’ and ‘capital–labour’ dynamics within it,
I focus on the world-systemic politics of economic rights in the making of the 1922 Irish
Free State Constitution. Analysing this particular constitution-making process is impor-
tant. In Ireland, as in contemporary Mexico and Germany, labour and agrarian move-
ments provoked constitution makers into considering socio-economic rights, including
provisions concerning the public ownership of natural resources, the regulation of rising
land values, universal education and children’s welfare. In Mexico and Germany, these
debates produced the world’s first constitutional guarantees of socio-economic rights
(Alston et al., 2008: 263). The final Irish draft, however, was limited to two ‘programmatic
Murray
489
declarations’ only, one specifying a right to education and the other provisional state
ownership of national resources (Kohn, 1932). Clarifying Irish exceptionalism is neces-
sary to identify what the particular constraints on socio-economic rights entrenchment
were. These constraints, I suggest, are most readily comprehensible in terms of Ireland’s
‘peripherality’ within the world system and how this conditioned popular struggles over
economic development and state formation, subsuming social demands into the national
independence movement. In this, the Irish experience would be replicated in many per-
ipheral postcolonies after the post-World War II break-up of the French and British
Empires (see Fanon, 2001; Go, 2003).
The argument runs as follows. The first part outlines how the dialectical mode of
inquiry advanced here, combining world-systems theory with the critical discourse anal-
ysis of popular and state constitutional forms, emerging from a critique of existing scho-
larship on the politics of constitutionalizing socio-economic rights. The second part uses
this conceptual apparatus to underline the importance of the world revolutionary strug-
gles of 1917 for the constitutionalization of socio-economic rights in Mexico (1917)
and Germany (1919). The third part outlines comparable levels of popular militancy
in Ireland during the war of independence (1919–1921) and subsequent civil war (1922–
1923), resulting in the creation of self-governing communities, agrarian land seizures and
workers’ soviets. These movements compelled Sinn Fe´in, the nationalist mass party, to
support a series of social rights discourses, shifting from Catholic social thought towards
a more interventionist state in social welfare and land redistribution. The fourth part
demonstrates how both forms of social rights discourse featured prominently in the Irish
Free State constitution-making process. Ultimately, however, the conservative balance
of core–peripheral and capital–labour relations within Ireland ensured a military, polit-
ical and ideological containment of popular movements’ ideals and practices. More tra-
ditional forms of constitutionalism, emphasizing national identity and classic, negative
rights of property, predominated. The fifth part delineates comparisons with the Mexican
and German experiences to underline how the contested process of constitutionalizing
socio-economic rights in Ireland was not sui generis but rather world systemic.
Anti-Systemic Struggles and Economic Rights ‘From Below’
Scholarship addressing why states constitutionally entrench socio-economic rights occu-
pies a short shelf space (see Tushnet, 2009: 3–17). We might usefully divide these works
into ‘formalist’ and ‘instrumentalist’ inquiries (see Bourdieu, 1987). Towards the form-
alist pole are those who consider constitutional law to be autonomous from the social
world and who look to such law to identify legal principles through formal reasoning.
Within this literature, justifying the constitutional recognition of socio-economic rights –
rather than explaining why recognition occurs – is the primary concern (see Fredman,
2008; Langford, 2012). Towards the instrumentalist pole, conversely, are those who
view constitutional law as registering and reproducing wider societal dynamics.
Cultural contextualists concentrate on establishing whether ‘inventing’ socio-economic
rights is congruent with a society’s wider norms (Carozza, 2003; Hunt, 2007). Function-
alist accounts emphasize how constitutions emerge from institutional development and
how the constitutional entrenchment of socio-economic rights will typically follow
490
Social & Legal Studies 24(4)
a state’s more gradual development of statutory welfare codes (Glendon, 1992; Thornhill,
2013). Finally, interest-based accounts of socio-economic rights entrenchment emphasize
wider constellations of power...
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