Jim Hoagland: Third World Civics Lesson

Jim Hoagland, for the Washington Post (6-19-05):

The enormous amount of chutzpah required for European Union leaders to fly to Baghdad and lecture the Iraqis on constitution-writing and consensus-building may never be quantified precisely, but it was readily available to Jack Straw and Co.

The foreign secretary of Great Britain, a country that has never written down its own constitution, headed up a delegation of European statesmen who went to Baghdad on June 9, slightly more than a week after the electorates of France and the Netherlands had voted down the draft E.U. constitution by overwhelming margins.

The Europeans discussed financial aid to Iraq and offered to train civil servants. Then, in a television interview, Straw urged the Iraqis to meet an Aug. 15 deadline for finishing their federal constitution and to take care to be "inclusive" by providing the Sunni minority with special privileges...

...In Iraq, the Kurdish minority is seeking the same kind of guarantee of federal recognition of its pesh merga -- or national guard forces -- in the new Iraqi constitution. Years of bloodshed at the hands of dictators have taught the Kurds to distrust strong central governments and to demand extended autonomy that they themselves can protect.

Constitution-writing in such societies is not a bloodless or abstract enterprise. All of us -- and perhaps Europeans most of all at this moment -- should resist the temptation to lecture Iraqis, southern Sudanese or anyone else about trusting in centralized, and centralizing, governments. There is not enough chutzpah to go around for that.