Abstract
Considering constitutions as the formalization of the political reconstruction and the establishment of new ruling bargains for regimes following revolutions, the chapter traces the steps in the evolution of the new ruling bargains in the three countries where the Arab revolution of 2011 succeeded: Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. It compares the pattern of constitutional politics in these countries after the ouster of Ben-`Ali and Mubarak and the overthrow of Qadhdhafi as the struggle for the new political order among competing social and political groups and institutions that will entrench the emerging ruling bargains by making new constitutions. The comparisons are centered around four sets of variations: variation in the traditions of the rule of law and those in the character of the old states and the power structures sustaining them, a distinction between negotiated revolutions, where the old state persists and then negotiate a new ruling bargain with the opposition, and the ones in which the state is destroyed and the revolutionary power struggle among competing groups determines the outcome of the revolutionary process. The mode of negotiation for the new ruling bargain differs considerably in the two cases. Tunisia and Egypt fall into the first category, Libya, in the second. The last source of variation is in relation to the constitutional placement of Islam. The main comparison in this regard is between Iran and its Islamic revolution and the 1979 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, on the one hand, and the role of the Islamist parties in the constitutional politics of the Arab revolutions of 2011, on the other. The Iranian constitution was based on a clericalist Islamic ideology that made Islam the basis of the new political order and its constitution, whereas, with the passing of the age of ideology, Islam is proposed by the Arab Islamist parties as a limitation on the legislative power of the state and not the basis of a new democratic political order.