Iceland is writing a new Constitution, and is taking a decidedly 21st approach to the task:

Iceland is months deep in a project to crowdsource the writing of a new constitution. The recovering European nation’s existing constitution is essentially a carbon copy of Denmark’s, Iceland claiming independence from Denmark in 1944. There were slight adjustments, like replacing the word “king” with “president,” but after the financial crisis that brought Iceland’s economy to its knees in 2008, the country’s decided to start from scratch. The approach uses a combination of social media platforms–Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr–to gather suggestions from the citizens, and members of a consitutional council post drafts on their website every week.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. On the one hand, I like seeing the power of new technology being applied to old problems, political or otherwise. This will certainly increase the number of people involved in drafting their new Constitution than otherwise would have been possible. On the other hand, the big question is whether this approach will produce a better document.

I honestly don’t have an answer to that question. I can see potential dangers in popular passions having too much sway, but the process is not actually democratic (long understood, since Aristotle, to be a bad form of government compared to constitutional republics), as the public is merely giving their input to a constitutional council. How much they are listening is not known to me. Alternatively, it may be that more voices will strengthen the document by enhancing the likelihood of spotting weaknesses, or by settling the question of public interpretation (wherein what is intended is not always what is later understood) up front – that is, if the public is going to interpret Clause X to mean Y, but you really want them to understand it to mean Z, you can find that out before the document is finalized and correct it.

Ultimately, the content of the document will matter far more than the novelty of its construction, and the form of the government need not necessarily be related to that method. A purely democratic method could produce a solid representational document. Likewise, a document written by representatives, as the US Constitution was, could turn out to lack the necessary checks and balances and be overly vulnerable to democratic passions.

For what it’s worth, I scanned a draft that was posted online and wasn’t particularly impressed. With the caveat that I was reading a translation, there were a number of potential ambiguities I saw and a lot I didn’t like ideologically, such as inclusion of minutiae that could leave the country unable to adapt to changing circumstances, as well as the outlining of various “positive rights” – which means the “right” to be given something by the government, i.e. taxpayers. I don’t live in Iceland, and there’s no reason why they must accept my view that real rights can only be so-called “negative rights” derived from natural rights theory, but I just don’t see that form of government being sustainable. But to each their own.

Though if anyone starts taking Fareed Zakaria seriously – something which I caution against out of the principle that fluff nonsense should not be listened to – and tries to do the same here in America, I’ll have a lot more to say on that matter.