History and Meaning of Establishing the Constitutions of North-East Asian States

Abstract

about Thai constitutionalism. Dissenters and losing parties leave legacies of their own, some of which resonate with current constitutional critiques in Thailand—for example, a well-known group of younger scholars who call themselves Nitirat, a name evoking the 1932 revolutionary People’s Party. Many of that group’s members characterize Thailand’s mix of rule-ordered and prerogative government as a “failure” of constitutionalism. That characterization is not wrong viewed through the wider lens of Thailand’s growing political diversity and unsettled, sometimes violent street politics and repression of the public sector. “Constitutional ethnography” by other contemporary scholars often examines the “living Constitution” in everyday interactions in courtrooms, bureaucratic encounters, policing, and other sites of encounters between officials and citizens. A system of administrative courts with significant power to review the actions of government officials was established in 1997 and retained under later Constitutions. These courts introduced ordinary Thai to the power of rule of law and procedural justice through successful litigations against numerous powerholders. As this relatively new system works a change both among bureaucrats and within popular culture and is reinforced by globalization of Thai society, the future of constitutionalism and rule of law seem particularly unpredictable. It is hardly surprising that a constitutional history of this scope leaves much unsaid. Incompleteness does not detract from Mérieau’s clear and well-documented account of the origins of a constitutionalism and its “own dogmatic logic.” Constitutional Bricolage is timely because alternative conceptions of “rule of law” are not an anomaly. At the end of the Cold War, the remaining world powers declared the world on a path to liberal democracy, making liberal constitutional theory the lingua franca and benchmark for international discourse about rule of law. Constitutional ethnography is revealing (as constitutional historians have long known) that behind the modern constitutional ideal lie unique histories of political struggle and compromise. The ideal is seldom an accurate description of what works or what is to come. As democracy erodes in places where liberal institutions seemed most secure, Thailand’s and Asia’s greater comfort with authoritarian government no longer seems an echo of a pre-rule-of-law past but a source of relevant lessons and possible paths for constitutionalism in the future that must be taken seriously elsewhere.