New constitutions--Japan and Iraq.(Foreign Affairs)

WHEN THE LAST shots have been fired and the neighbourhood vigilante groups in Baghdad and Basra put their guns back in the cupboards, a new Iraqi leadership--to be guided by an American proconsul--will consider a new form of constitutional governance. The new men in power will quickly realise that there is a historical precedent to be dusted off and looked at afresh.

On May 3, 1947, the Japanese administration, or what was left in place after the Emperor's surrender and various suicides by high-ranking military officials, adopted a constitution, drafted by the Americans, which enshrined the principles of peace and democracy, and asserted, in the much-debated phrase, "The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international conflict."

The new constitution was not agreed upon without dispute. MacArthur, the US supreme, didn't like what the Japanese parliament had come up with in its first attempts at a new formal constitution, so he gave the job over to his own people, who set about drafting a constitution which was eventually unanimously adopted by both houses of the Japanese parliament, in the certain knowledge that, if it were not adopted, the American occupation of Japan would be interminably prolonged and possibly become permanent.

The new constitution, which purported to prevent Japan from maintaining land, sea or air forces with any kind of militaristic potential again, was welcomed by ordinary Japanese, particularly Article 9, the "Peace Clause", which stated firmly the veto on any future military adventurism.

The "American" constitution was not Japan's first. Its previous constitution had been based on one adopted in 1889, a blending of British and German models (the Japanese army, another "learning from the West" model, was based on Prussia's; its navy was based on England's). That earlier constitution, however, did not provide the Diet, the Japanese parliament, with any power to restrain the military, although during the Meiji Restoration, the samurai, Japan's traditional warrior class, had been stripped of its traditional status, tenets of the bushido code which were considered to be inappropriately old-fashioned, and forbidden to wear the ...