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Amery on the Constitution: Britain and the European Union*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Extract
IT WAS ASSUMED BY AMERY THAT THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION WAS AN important topic for study and something which might require further reform, because with the rest of his generation he took it for granted that the Constitution was itself wholly under the control of the British people through their indigenous institutions. Parliamentary sovereignty could only be understood in the light of sovereignty in the sense of political independence. At the time he was writing the importance of this basic concept had been reinforced by recent experience. Many European countries had lost their sovereignty through the imposition of German rule and had only had it restored to them by a massive military effort in which Britain had played no mean part. In their turn, the victorious allies had deprived Germany of its sovereignty and were through the occupation regimes starting on a path which it was hoped would lead, as indeed it did, to a Germany purged of the Nazi virus.
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References
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