Читать книгу American Democracy in Context - Joseph A. Pika - Страница 51

It had been a long, hot summer, and the framers of the Constitution were growing weary. The process of drafting a constitution had led to passionate debates about issues ranging from the role of religion in government to how power would be shared between the national and local governments. Since convening in May, the framers had agreed that the national government would consist of three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. The executive branch would be led by a president. A Supreme Court would enforce the Constitution, and the representative government would be elected by the people. Now, as the end of August approached, the framers remained deadlocked on several key issues. Nevertheless, they were determined to find compromises that would allow them to finish their work and send the Constitution on for ratification. Did this scenario take place in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787? No—Baghdad, summer of 2005.

Indeed, there are some significant similarities between the experiences of the framers in 1787 America and 2005 Iraq. Both were engaged in writing what scholars refer to as “post-conflict constitutions”—that is, constitutions written after winning a struggle for independence or overthrowing an existing government. Both the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and the Constitutional Drafting Committee in Baghdad (each with fifty-five delegates) were attempting to solve what appeared to be insoluble political problems. In 1787 Philadelphia, the framers, concerned with the weakness of the central government under the Articles of Confederation, were attempting to create a national government strong enough to ensure compliance with national law at a time when the core principles of the recently fought American Revolution had instilled in the populace a profound distrust of coercive government by distant rulers. How could they create a national government strong enough to keep the nation together but not so strong as to undermine core principles such as liberty or to excessively infringe on the autonomy of states? In 2005 Baghdad, the framers were similarly trying to balance a strong central government with regional autonomy. And both sets of framers consisted of rival factions that disagreed fundamentally about core issues. Could consensus be built under such circumstances?

Consider also the significant differences between 1787 Philadelphia and 2005 Baghdad. For one, the American framers were working in uncharted territory. Individual American states had created constitutions in the wake of the Declaration of Independence, but the concept of a written constitution governing an entire nation was new and untested. Moreover, there had never before been a republican (that is, representative) government on the scale of the United States. In contrast, constitution writing had become something of a cottage industry by 2005. In the past 50 years, some 200 new constitutions have been drafted for nations around the world; over 25 since 2005, ranging from Angola to Zimbabwe.¹ This has allowed observers to analyze which processes work best when creating a new constitution.² Another difference was that the Iraqi framers faced a nation much more deeply divided along lines of ethnicity, language, religious sect, and region than did the American framers. Moreover, the post-conflict situations were different: Whereas the American colonists had fought to win their independence from a colonial power, a tyrannical Iraqi government had been overthrown as a result of an invasion by outside forces, and the Iraqis drafted their constitution under the watchful eye of an occupying force.

The Iraq Constitution was ratified later in 2005 and remains in place. The fact that there are similarities between it and the U.S. Constitution is no accident. The U.S. Constitution has endured and become a model for many constitutions around the world. We now take for granted the success of the U.S. Constitution, but that success is really quite amazing. The American colonies were, as historian Joseph J. Ellis put it, “generally regarded as a provincial and wholly peripheral outpost of Western Civilization.” Despite that, it became the breeding ground for a novel approach to governance that has endured the test of time and emerged as an archetype for success.³