Post-Election Iraq: Facing the Constitutional Challenge

Nathan J. Brown
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
February 2005

 

Iraq's newly elected National Assembly (NA) will soon take up its major task—although hardly its only one—of drafting a permanent constitution. The task is to be completed in time to submit the draft constitution to a national plebiscite by October 15, 2005.

Constitutions are rarely written during calm times. Countries rarely feel any pressure to redesign their basic institutions unless they are confronting crisis. There are some exceptions, of course—in fact, one of the major obstacles to the development of constitutionalism in the Arab world is that constitutions were written under conditions of insufficient turmoil. Instead, most were issued by entrenched regimes seeking to restructure themselves or proclaim new ideological directions. Thus, Iraq is departing somewhat from patterns in the Arab world—and instead emulating some broader international patterns—by attempting to write a constitution as an act of political reconstruction. Indeed, with Iraq still under occupation and a violent insurgency in full force, it is difficult to think of more difficult circumstances for deliberating over basic matters of governance, politics, and identity.

Constitutions are often written in troubled times, but they are hardly panaceas. Only one of the first three attempts to write constitutions for a sovereign state—in the United States, Poland, and France at the end of the eighteenth century—outlived its authors, and even that one could not prevent a bloody civil war. The Iraqi NA is not only to draft a constitution but also to do so quite quickly. The first draft is due on August 15, 2005, to allow sufficient time for discussion before Iraqis vote on it two months later. And the draft is to be written while the NA simultaneously serves as the country's interim parliament.

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