Domestic political pressure drove William McKinley to launch the Spanish-American War after an internal explosion sank the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. As usual, the US wasn’t prepared for the war, but Spain proved no match for American military power. The US fought for Cuban independence but also joined the imperial powers by securing colonial possessions such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The US also annexed Hawaii. The US soon faced an unexpected war in the Philippines for which it was also unprepared, and eventually won. Theodore Roosevelt succeeded the assassinated McKinley, secured land for the Panama Canal, and launched the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. William Howard Taft followed Roosevelt to the White House and launched a failed “Dollar Diplomacy” grand strategy. American involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean intensified, particularly in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

Costantino Mortati theorised the material constitution as the ‘grey area between law and politics’. This space is the source of all normativity and is comprised of two fundamental features: the essential content and the normative material elements. Both arise from and reflect the material relations present in society. Further, the formal aspect of the constitution, the text of the law, is a by-product of any given configuration of such material relations. The implication of Mortati’s focus on the ‘constitution in the material sense’ is his extensive theorisation and active promotion of means of popular participation suitable to uphold the material constitution and keep its relationship to the formal aspects of law active and dynamic.