Center Journals

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).

Shakib Arslan (1870-1946) belongs to a period and generation of intellectuals who witnessed the collapse of the Ottoman-Islamic League and the formation of the period and generation of the idea, or identity, of Arab nationalism. Arslan started out as an Ottoman calling for the preservation of the Sublime Porte as a bastion against the risks of fragmentation and European colonialism that both loomed on the horizon at that historic moment. Consequently, he opposed the revolt of Sharif Hussein in 1916 from the outset and was also against the First Arab Congress held in Paris in 1913, and published his book “To the Arabs: A Statement to the Arab Nation on the Decentralized Party” in opposition to that Congress.

Bishara examines terms such as “the intellectual,” “the intelligentsia,” “the organic intellectual,” and “the public intellectual”. He distinguishes between intellectuals and those who are required to utilize their intellectual capacity; between academics immersed exclusively in their field of expertise and social actors who take an interest in various social affairs without specializing in a specific field. The author then moves on to mark the distinction between “an intellectual” and the rest of society. Through this process, and by critiquing alternative conceptualizations, the author elucidates what he considers the main attribute of an intellectual—the capacity to make decisions based on epistemological grounds that lead to value judgments. Two types of intellectuals, argues Bishara, are absent from the Arab revolutions. The first is the “revolutionary intellectual,” who is able to both maintain a critical distance from the regimes in place and the revolutions, and also critique them. “Conservative intellectuals,” on the other hand, are capable of explaining the necessity of keeping the old regime, promoting the inherent opportunities for change within it, as well as the wisdom enshrined within the state and its traditions. For Bishara, the role of the revolutionary intellectual does not end with the outbreak of a revolution, but in fact takes on greater complexity and significance once the need to propose post-revolutionary alternatives arises.