Syria is reportedly sliding back towards civil war, as its various factions demand devolved authority. It is at root the same issue, that of local autonomy, that led to regional unrest in Ukraine and splintered leadership in Palestine. It underlies the devastating conflicts in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. All these places are flush with guns, allies and bombast. What they lack are national constitutions that allow their citizens sufficient local control to live at peace with others in one nation. They lack the skills of political federation.
The present Ukraine war followed the failure of peace accords reached in Minsk in 2014 and 2015; critically, they depended on the technical details of how self-determination was to be allowed in eastern Ukraine. A later failure was that of the Istanbul deal after the Russian invasion in 2022. It appeared to be the result of President Zelenskyy’s reaction to Vladimir Putin’s Bucha massacre. But the origins of failure go back to Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine’s reaction to years of corrupt and oppressive rule from Kyiv. Similar dissent exists among Russian minorities in the Baltic states. Everywhere, localism matters.
A constitution capable of bringing stable peace through self-government to Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza may seem almost inconceivable, but one day it has to emerge. Peace does always follow war. We assume that Qatari and Egyptian mediators are wrestling with this now, but it remains mystifying what leverage they can have over parties whose command structures are so wholly committed to armed conflict. No less urgent is for Syria to be helped towards a coalition similar to that which has kept neighbouring Lebanon at peace, however hesitantly. Syria needs an invasion of constitutional entrepreneurs.
Devolved constitutions work. India held together after partition by permitting a ruthless regionalism. It took Spain decades of civil war to reach an accord with its Basque separatists, but that has held. Britain failed. It is four years since Ireland celebrated the centenary of its departure from the United Kingdom, after a bitter civil war following a denial of home rule. Even today, neither Northern Ireland nor Scotland are stable members of the union. The reason is simple: London’s obsessive centralisation.
The more technology concentrates power on central governments, the more regions and provinces – in democracies and autocracies alike – demand greater freedom. Deprive them of it and they rise in varying degrees of revolt. Governments subject to no constitutional constraint, as in Britain, simply find devolution unpalatable. Every British political party swears to honour localism while in opposition, and then crushes it when in power. Virtually the last area of local discretion in England, town and country planning, is now being overruled by Keir Starmer. He is abolishing hundreds of democratic district councils he finds inconvenient to his bureaucracy.
Europe’s wiser regimes use their constitutions to appease local dissent, such as Italy regarding Sicily, Spain in Catalonia, Denmark in Greenland. Switzerland has long decentralised to its cantons, almost to the limit of national sovereignty; even qualification to vote was once discretionary. Germany’s constitution was carefully crafted after the second world war to distribute power among the Länder, to limit the reach of the central state. When Tito’s Yugoslavia fell apart, the failure to establish a vigorous federal constitution led its provinces into bloody civil war and disintegration.
Sound constitution-building is essential to a secure statehood. Arguably the most successful is that created by the United States – plural – of America in the 18th century. It is safeguarded with a central balance of powers and autonomy vested in the rights of states, a balance that may soon be tested to destruction. But the US has held together a union of disparate ethnic and national peoples in a way that has defeated subsequent efforts at union in both Europe and South America.
Constitutions may be hard to write in peacetime, but they are even harder after countries have collapsed into war. When guns are blazing and bombs falling, talk of contested boundaries, devolved assemblies, discretionary taxes and local policing seems eerily irrelevant. Yet such accords there must be. Constitution-building may offer no headlines, but what it can do is stop hundreds of thousands of people dying.
The masters of postwar diplomacy, such as George Kennan and Henry Kissinger, kept Europe free of war for half a century. The philosophy of containment meant the avoidance of head-to-head conflict with Russia. It also involved a measured response to Russia’s handling of its relations with its frontline neighbours, such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Containment held until finally Russia could no longer maintain authority over its family of subordinate states, their regimes exhausted by impotence. Most departed totally from Moscow’s empire.
Both Gaza and Ukraine will need constitutions of masterful robustness. Yet while generals parade the majesty of their command, diplomatic peace-making seems in its infancy. Someone has to fashion political structures for these places that meet the long-term cravings of their citizens on the ground – cravings above all for freedom from interference from a higher authority. That is a freedom that modern governments, in peace or at war, still find hopelessly difficult to deliver.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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