Page Content
Over the past fifty years,
democratic constitutional design has undergone a sea change. After the Second
World War, newly independent countries tended simply to copy the basic
constitutional rules of their former colonial masters, without seriously
considering alternatives. Today, constitution writers choose more deliberately
among a wide array of constitutional models, with various advantages and
disadvantages. While at first glance this appears to be a beneficial
development, it has actually been a mixed blessing: Since they now have to deal
with more alternatives than they can readily handle, constitution writers risk
making ill-advised decisions. In my opinion, scholarly experts can be more
helpful to constitution writers by formulating specific recommendations and
guidelines than by overwhelming those who must make the decision with a barrage
of possibilities and options. This essay presents a set of such
recommendations, focusing in particular on the constitutional needs of
countries with deep ethnic and other cleavages. In such deeply divided
societies the interests and demands of communal groups can be accommodated only
by the establishment of power sharing, and my recommendations will indicate as
precisely as possible which particular power-sharing rules and institutions are
optimal and why. (Such rules and institutions may be useful in less intense
forms in many other societies as well).
