The Noble Class And Constitution

The present study of foreign constitutional history of China has been focusing on constitutional histories of major developd countries including the USA, the UK, Germany, France and Japan. The study of the constitutional history of non-mainstream developed countries, i.e., those not in the leading position in international politics, economy, military affairs and cultural affairs, e.g., Sweden, is not sufficient. However, this implies that there is a great space for the academic community to explore in this field. As such, the auhthor believes that the constitutional history of Sweden is worth studying.Being one of the developed western countries, Sweden has a unique constitution and constitutional system which are drawing increasing attention from the international academic community. This is attributable to the following main characteristics of the Swedish constitution:one, it has a time-honored history; two, its development has been continuous and steady; three, Sweden has a unique constitutional cultural; and four, the evolution of the Swedish constitution is rooted in a unique social structure. In the study, the author came to know that the main reason that the Swedish constitution has such characterirtics is that since the very ancient times Sweden has had a highly stable and powerful nobility class. The chronical strife between raoyalty and nobility is the basic reason of the above-mentioned characteristics of the Swedish constitutional history.The emergence of the royal power manifests a strong characteristic of the primitive Germanic democracy institution, i.e., the royalty was elected by the upper tier aristocrats. The aristocrats dominated the elections. In the Middle Ages, the demand of wars gave rise to Fralse, a privileged nobility class. Later, the Swedish nobility acquired growing powers in military, economic and political spheres. Eventually the nobility and the royalty arrived at a state of dynamic but constant check and balance with each other. The formation of such balance of power provided a foundation as well as basic conditions for the early emergence and steady evolution of Swedish constitutions, and enabled Swedish constitutions to mature and develop in the course of struggles bewteen nobility and royal power. During this process, the political tradition of maining royal power of the Swedish nobility safeguarded the existence of the royal power; in the mean time, the nobility also tried to assert its privileged position by mainitaining the royal power and the king election tradition. Such tradition secured that the conflict between the nobility and the royal power had always been kept within an appropriate extent, even when the nobility was an orligarchy and the royal power was rather weak. With such a political culture and in the context of such evolutionary process of the constitution, in1809the Swedish nobility promulgated the1809constitution which is both progressive and concervative. From then on the Swedish constitution was ranked in modern constitutions. Another character of the Swedish nobility is that they can always strike an appropriate balance between progress and conservatism. This directly led to the drastic but peaceful struggle between the nobility and other classes in1866. The result of this struggle was the adoption of the reform plan of the Swedish parliament and termination of the social hierarchical system. Sweden entered into the age of general sufferage and the era of modern democracy.Comparing the relations between the Swedish nobility and the Swedish constitutional history and that in the UK, Germany and France, one can see that there is a similarity between the case of Sweden and that of the UK. Specifically, in history both their nobilities maintained a dynamic balance of power with their royal powers. In such relations, the nobility acted both as a guardian and as a checker of the royal power; it tried to maintain its privileged status while also learning to collaborate with the newly emerging bourgeois clsess in order to reinfornce its ruling status. In this sense the nobility of these two coutries both served as a buffer zone for class conflict. As a result, in both countries constitutional democracy was established. The situations in France and Germany are two extremes. The French nobility was wiped out of the political arena of France due to its weakness before the royal power and its hostility toward the bourgeois class, hence resulting in a highly revolutionary and unstable constitution. In Germany, on the contrary, as a result of the nobility’s lasting prevelance over the royalty in political and military aspects, the nobility class was highly conservative during the bourgeois revolutionary era in the19th century. As a result, only by mid-19th century did Germany promulgate a nationa-wide constitution under the dominance of the nobility.The conclusion of the author is that the Swedish nobility had played a pivotal role in the formation of Sweden’s constitutional culsture and constitutional history.