Abstract
Many modern constitutions, including those included in this volume, reflect ambitious programmes for transforming existing social, economic and political interests through political engineering. In countries like Iran and Turkey the underlying ideal of the constitution is not the protection of the existing nation but nothing less than the creation of a new nation. As Arjomand has noted, this desire for social engineering through constitutionalism is a characteristic of ideological constitutions found in many developing countries.
The attempt to transform the nation, however, is often at the expense of powerful actors and is opposed by significant portions of the society. As a result the state emerges as an ‘enlightened’ institution whose job is not only designing a system that will bring the ‘nation to the level of contemporary civilization’ but also a system that will protect the civilizing project against its ‘enemies’, even when those enemies are a majority in the polity. The Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran adopted this project by proposing a new order of a different kind. For Turkish leaders, ‘contemporary civilization’ is Western and secular.
