Committed constitutionalism : Europe and the circumstances of good

Abstract

As tiny little ants go about their ant business, travelling around in cavalcade, developing ant civilisation on hilltop towns wherever they go, do they contemplate the possibility that the world is bigger than the empires that they build? Do they know why they have to turn the cavalcade around when they come to the edge of the garden patio? Do they understand what has happened if a human foot kills forty of them in an instant? In all their industry and organisation, do they allow for the fact that there is something beyond them, which they cannot control? More specifically, I wondered as a little girl, did they know that I existed, and that I liked to spend summer afternoons watching them, and that if I took one of them in my tiny palm, it still would be smaller than the nail on my little finger? And if they didn’t — and from my lengthy study of these creatures it seemed to me that they didn’t - then how did we know that we weren’t making the same mistake? As we build up human civilisation, do we allow the possibility that the world is larger than our empires? That, for all the things we can create and construct, there are still things that are beyond us? That perhaps we too could be held in the hallow of a palm that is greater than ours? And if I could think of this possibility, even if my ant friends could not, then wasn’t it important that I should take it seriously? But, actually, just by holding this possibility and wondering about its implications, wasn’t I already taking it seriously in an important way that the ants weren’t?