As long as power is exercised and limited in a manner that in the end comports with human dignity, constitutionalism may be said to prevail. As introduced by Okoth-Ogendo, this formulation applies to certain African polities where the constitution serves mainly to demonstrate the sovereignty of the state, but where no particular heed is paid to democratic or libertarian sensibilities. This theme is amplified in the South Asian context by Radhika Coomeraswamy, who lucidly explains the importance of the ideology of constitutionalism to authoritarian regimes. Two familiar sets of circumstances provide the main testing ground for illumination of this question. The first focuses on questions of economic development and the issue of whether political and civil rights should be privileged in a constitutional order.
Several authors question the appropriateness of the western model for developing countries.
While there is very little new here, the arguments put forward in these chapters are worth revisiting, if for no other reason than that they force one to confront what turns out to be largely a false dichotomy, namely that negative and positive liberties pose a real choice as far as strategies for constitutional development are concerned. Elsewhere, for example, Amartya Sen, has made a powerful case for the constitutive importance of political rights by demonstrating that the conflict between civil rights and economic performance, often presumed in constitutional analyses like the ones adverted to above, rests on dubious empirical grounds. This is not to say that liberal constitutionalism guarantees social justice, and Sen for one worries about the needs of distinct and particularist minorities in regimes that are structured along the lines of western-style democracy. These possibilities encompass a substantial range, from a rather weak constitutional acknowledgment of group rights to an endorsement of communal autonomy that is so robust that it encourages secession as a solution to problems of injustice. Thus at its core constitutionalism should be understood as aspiring to achieve an appropriate balance between individual and associational rights.