The (not so hidden) elephant in the room : confronting international constitution-making's eurocentric gaze

Abstract

Anna Saunders’s article, “Constitution-Making as a Technique of International Law: Reconsidering the Post-war Inheritance,” is an important addition to the literature that problematizes the idea of international constitutionmaking. 1 At the heart of Saunders’s critique of international constitution making—defined as the involvement of international institutions in national constitution-making processes—is the point that the parameters of what constitutes “local ownership” of the constitution-making process is detached from debates on rethinking neoliberal economic structures and material interests.2 As a result, constitutions in post-conflict societies fail to speak to the socio-economic realities of a people and, most importantly, diminish their agency to envision alternatives. Saunders offers a detailed historical account of why such failure, or what she refers to as “selective technicity,” has become standard practice, and then goes further to stress the imperative of reimagining the vocabulary of what constitutes “local ownership” in the context of meaningful societal transformation. In this essay, I extend Saunders’s thesis to argue that if the international constitution-making process does not shed its Eurocentric gaze, we will be unable to proffer sustainable suggestions to make the process responsive to the realities of a people. Through its Eurocentric gaze, international constitution-making is rooted in fixed, prefabricated ideas of permissible juridical and politico-economic structures.Although the epistemic agency of the people to determine their constitutional destiny is often discussed, in reality such agency is expected to operate within strict neoliberal politico- economic tenets. The result of this contradiction is a dialogue of the deaf, where the so-called “international experts” together with compromised national elites speak around and past the people whose existence depends on the stipulated constitutional norms. This essay unpacks the Eurocentric gaze and suggests a fundamental rethink, one that privileges the “dignity of agency.” I owe this terminology to the PrimeMinister of Barbados,Mia Mottley. Writing about the need to envision a new kind of internationalism, she argued that the pervading distrust in national governments and global institutions stems from feelings of exclusion.3 The alternative is an “ethical compass” that sees trust and inclusion as indivisible, one that “involves giving individuals . . . the dignity of agency, a say in their own affairs, and a stake, above all else, in their own society and economy.”4 As such, dignity of agency speaks to two interrelated issues: how a people, without manipulation, shape the parameters of discussions on ideas that affect their existential concerns; and how they see themselves in normative outputs.