The imposed revolution and its constitution
Subtitle: Iraqi constitutional politics during the American occupation
By: Andrew Arato.
Series: Columbia studies in political thought / political history
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 360
ISBN-13: 9780231143028; 9780231512435
Subjects: Sīstānī, ʻAlī al-Ḥusaynī; Bremer, L. Paul; Constitutional law -- Iraq; Constitutional history -- Iraq; Postwar reconstruction -- Iraq; Iraq -- Politics and government. -- 2003-
Description: "The attempt in 2004 to draft an interim constitution in Iraq and the effort to enact a permanent one in 2005 were unintended outcomes of the American occupation, which first sought to impose a constitution by its agents. This two-stage constitution-making paradigm, implemented in a wholly unplanned move by the Iraqis and their American sponsors, formed a kind of compromise between the populist-democratic project of Shi'ite clerics and America's external interference. As long as it was used in a coherent and legitimate way, the method held promise. Unfortunately, the logic of external imposition and political exclusion compromised the negotiations. Andrew Arato is the first person to record this historic process and analyze its special problems. He compares the drafting of the Iraqi constitution to similar, externally imposed constitutional revolutions by the United States, especially in Japan and Germany, and identifies the political missteps that contributed to problems of learning and legitimacy. Instead of claiming that the right model of constitution making would have maintained stability in Iraq, Arato focuses on the fragile opportunity for democratization that was strengthened only slightly by the methods used to draft a constitution. Arato contends that this event would have benefited greatly from an overall framework of internationalization, and he argues that a better set of guidelines (rather than the obsolete Hague and Geneva regulations) should be followed in the future. With access to an extensive body of literature, Arato highlights the difficulty of exporting democracy to a country that opposes all such foreign designs and fundamentally disagrees on matters of political identity."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The externally imposed revolution and its destruction of the Iraqi State; title: Postsovereign constitution making : the new paradigm (and Iraq); title: Sistani versus Bremer : the emergence of the two-stage model in Iraq; title: Imposition and bargaining in the making of the interim constitution; title: The making of the "permanent" constitution.