Inclusive Constitution-Making: The Icelandic Experiment

The writing of a constitution is serious business. In the popular imagination (in the U.S., at least), it is the affair of a few illustrious white men clad in tights, neckties, and funny wigs, gathered during hot summer months in the confined rooms of a low brick building of 18th century Philadelphia. These men were a select few, fifty-five in total, many of them public figures of high intellectual caliber and social and economic status. After months of hard work behind closed doors, they proclaimed a text meant to be the unquestioned foundation of a republic for the ages, one that bore no trace of their compromises, hesitations, and changes of heart. The so-called 'founders' are still remembered, quoted, and celebrated as authorities in contemporary public debates. Now picture something very different: a constitutional council of twenty-five individuals, fifteen of whom are men, ten of whom are women, many of them obscure (in the sense of being previously unknown to the larger public) and all of them having little to no prior political experience. They gather in grey, concrete buildings in a suburb of 21st century Reykjavik, Iceland. In the picture taken of them as a group and posted on the Council webpage, one of the women appears in a special wheelchair for the severely disabled. Adapted from the source document.