I guess it was president andrew jhonson who offered resistance to reconstruction
Greece is a crossroad of cultures, it is in Europe, but also it is near Egypt and the East. So it had a big exchange of ideas and philosophy, it developped science and trade, and being surrounded by the sea, it developped maritime skills (military and trading fleet). This lasted form antiquity to modern history.
The importance is that for the first time in history, a national constitution explicitly stated that it had been drafted not by a monarch or a group of barons but by representatives of ordinary citizens. It expressed the fact that such government had been instituted by the democratic will of the people and not by the “divine right” of a monarch or ruler.
It is definitely a collective term; it puts forward the right of self-government of the national community. It does not express the ruling will of an individual person but the collective will of an entire nation.
