Stephen Kotkin

Because when you introduce constitutional order, like in England, in the US, to a certain extent in France, which has a more complicated process, you do it before you're in the mass age.

You do it before the working class and the peasantry are politically organized.

So you're able to introduce rule of law and constitutionalism based on a private property model where not that many people get to vote.

The franchise is restricted.

The vast majority of people can't vote.

Only property holders can vote or only men can vote, not women.

And so you have this restricted franchise, which is like a breathing space for you to introduce and get used to a liberal constitutional order that you can then democratize over time.

So over time,

non-property holding males get to vote.

Over time, women get to vote.

Over time, slaves become citizens.

They become people and fully fledged citizens, and they also get to vote and to own property legally.

So you have this order that has all of these birth defects.

It's very restrictive in the franchise.

Some people are slaves, not even people.

And yet over time, you can get that right because the category citizenship and the constitutional order are already embedded.

When you have the constitutional revolution in the mass age, and when you have the peasants and the workers and those for national self-determination participating in the constitutional revolution, constitutional order, rule of law isn't enough for a lot of them.

There are these exceptions, which have turned out to be

a false normative or guiding stars for us in every case.

So it happened in West Germany and Japan under American occupation, enormously successful.