Constitution Making Under Occupation

Klappentext 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. 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.

Autorentext
Andrew Arato is Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory at the New School for Social Research. His books include Civil Society and Political Theory; Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy; From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory; The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism; and Habermas on Law, Democracy, and Legitimacy.

Inhalt
Preface 1. The Externally Imposed Revolution and Its Destruction of the Iraqi State 2. Postsovereign Constitution Making: The New Paradigm (and Iraq) 3. Sistani Versus Bremer: The Emergence of the Two-Stage Model in Iraq 4. Imposition and Bargaining in the Making of the Interim Constitution 5. The Making of the "Permanent" Constitution Conclusion Notes Index