by the courts. Other important formal constitutional codes include those of
Australia, Canada and Germany, though in the last case the binding rules are
technically only called the ‘Basic Law’ (Grundgesetz), because at the time of its
inception Germany was divided and the authors did not wish to appear to
accept the permanence of the division by creating a constitution only for one
half of the country.
It is not, of course, necessary to have a single written constitutional
document in order to have constitutional law. Indeed, any stable political
system must have a set of basic and defining laws or conventions. In Britain,
though there is neither a formal constitution nor a court specifically concerned
with constitutional matters, there are clear legal rules and practices restricting
the actions of political institutions, granting rights and enforcing duties.Habeas
corpus, for example, is as much a constitutional law as its rough equivalent in the
due processclauses of the US constitution. There is, in fact, no clear line
between constitutional law and ordinary law. The 1964 Police Act, which
governs the structure, rights and duties of Britain’s police forces, and also the
controls over them, could, for example, be regarded in certain contexts as
belonging to constitutional law; and so could the annual Mutiny Acts which,
until 1879, were necessary to give legal standing to the armed forces (and to an
extent their successors, the five-yearly Army Acts and Army and Air Force
Acts). Other bodies of law can be seen as at least proto-constitutional law, in
particular much of the law deriving from interpretations of the Treaty of
Rome by theEuropean Court of Justice. The Scotland Act of 1998, which
established a quasi-federal structure for policy making, comes as close as
anything in British experience to a written constitution.
Containment
Containment is or was (the correct tense to use is unclear) the official US
foreign policy doctrine, from 1947 onwards, on how the USA should react to
the expansion of international communist influence. The idea, originating
with President Truman’s approach to problems in the unstable context of
immediate post-war Europe, was that America should seek to contain com-
munism within the territorial boundaries it had achieved as a result of the
Second World War. Initially this meant the military defence of Western
Europe, and of American allies such as Turkey and Greece which were under
severe threat in the Mediterranean. As such it represented not the aggressive
and even arrogant policy revisionists have tended to paint it as, but a more
moderate policy, given a considerable feeling in parts of both America and
Britain that communism should be fought directly and ousted from Eastern
Europe.
Containment