Formalizing Relationships Smooth Difference | Dr. Nicholas Cole | BRIs Constitutional Conversations
Clear rules of engagement helped mediate difference at the Constitutional Convention. Dr. Nicholas Cole, Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford and lead designer on the Quill Project sees this as a key feature for the success of the early government.
0:00 and so what are some of the central key points in negotiating historical texts you say you’ve started to look at some others that the co project you know over but it’s been some of the more successful ones in history and and maybe maybe some month or less I think what
0:25 started to interest us with the projects we’ve started to look at is how much formality has been a part of these negotiations that we’ve looked at and buy from well Artie I don’t just mean you know there were that there was a
0:46 kind of obsession with rules and who could speak well and so on but but also that almost every speech made at the convention is made concerning a specific proposition of written text specific language that is under debate and that’s
1:08 really one of the secrets to how these sort of processes work we think of it as a great meeting of philosophers and the great paintings that depict the convention show sometimes what can look like quite a rowdy seeing with people standing and talking but actually the the secret to making this work was that
1:29 it was always very clear at any particular moment what had and had not been agreed and what was the appropriate thing to be discussing at a particular moment because they work through documents line by line and paragraph by paragraph and and say you would know very clearly you know when was the right
1:50 moment to be raising particular issues and and when maybe those moments have passed and you maybe had to wait for the next iteration of the draft and I think that feature of the Convention which we also see in the Bill of Rights debates in in Congress and and again at
2:10 state-level Constitutional Convention in America um all much more modern processes like the the Indian Constitution that’s that’s written 1946 to nine or the creation of UN documents after the Second World War all of these processes are very paper-based and
2:33 really dependent on a secretariat that is able to tell you what you have and haven’t agreed and that for me is one of the the really fascinating features of these debates now of course we know that people have conversations outside of the formal settings and we know that all of that goes on as well but as far as the
2:54 formal process is concerned it really is kept on the rails by this this commitment to being very precise about what and isn’t is not under discussion at a particular moment and you know as well as we set the 1787 convention in
3:16 the context of other American state level conventions or or international processes of debate that’s one of the features we’re finding again and again that that that it’s that formality that seems to make these processes work