The years up to and including 1815 saw the establishment of many of the essential features of modern Scandinavia, including the region's outer borders and new internal constitutional arrangements. These developments occurred within an international legal order undergoing significant change. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that followed the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions were partly the result of – and themselves resulted in – major transformations in public international law, partly summed up at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The era from the 1770s to 1815 represents one of the most important periods of change in the history of international law.

A fundamental basis for the project has been a wide understanding of the area of normative orders. In order to grasp the legal structures that shaped the normative character of the Norwegian story in 1814 the research project decided to take into account a wide range of normative acts, such as constitutions, treaties, codifications and ongoing debates on these issues. Accordingly the project aimed at studying the close interactions between domestic constitutional-legal regimes and external international legal regimes. Especially the normative connecting legal acts of international treaties and constitutions have been highlighted as can be seen in numerous papers being delivered during the CAS-year. Systematically emphasizing the international dimension of that of making a constitution at the time and, furthermore, to interpret constitutions in connection with a host of other legal devices that formed the international legal order, has shown itself to be most fruitful. The research has understood the different normative tools of the age (treaties, constitutions, codifications and other new forms of regulations) as international legal acts and by that the research has contributed to a more multileveled understanding of the normative condition of Norway in 1814, then being set up as a new state. By conducting this line of research the so called ‘international background’ of the Norwegian international and constitutional history around 1814 ceases to be merely background but rather becomes integrated into the historical interpretation.

Some of the fellows partisipating in the project have been involved in other projects funded by the University of Oslo, the Research Council of Nowray or the Norwegian Parliament on topics related to 1814 and the Norwegian constitution. We firmly believe that the different projects have had cross-fertilizing effects and that the stay at CAS has made these rather complex interrelated 1814-projects possible to carry out.