The Meaning of East Timor's Nationhood
nytimes.com
"Ralf Dahrendorf, a sociologist and the former director of the London School of Economics, has thought quite a bit
about state-building and has written about it as a three-stage process. The first, which he calls the "hour of the lawyers,"
is when new constitutions are written, including basic rights and the rule of law. There has been a lot of this going
around — not only with new states, like East Timor, but with some old ones that needed to come up with new charters
after Communism collapsed."
"So, naturally, a lot of what brand-new and recycled states first emphasize is constitution writing. Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law professor at American University, has closely watched and often advised on the process in emerging nations like the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Mongolia and South Africa. "Everyone was different," he observed.
"Usually they tried to go back to something in their own history — either real or imagined. In Bulgaria, for example, a unicameral legislature had been traditional, so they favored that." |
