Decolonising the understanding of constitutional developments in Chile: A conversation with Arnulf Becker Lorca

Abstract

Since late 2020, Chile has been at the centre of a gripping theoretical debate over the form Latin American postcolonial constitutions should take, with implications for constitutionalism across the globe. This renewed interest in the transformative power of constitutions was spurred by a mass movement in a country marred by violence over inequality and rising costs of living in 2019. The social uprising demanded that a new document replace the neoliberal constitution put in place in 1980 by dictator Augusto Pinochet. However, the process of writing a fresh constitution has been protracted, with a much discussed first draft being defeated by a national plebiscite in September 2022. To understand the constitutional developments in Chile, we interviewed Chilean legal scholar Dr Arnulf Becker Lorca, Professor of Public International Law, European University Institute, Florence. Dr Becker Lorca was an adviser on the first draft. Here, he discusses the timeline of the drafting process and the reasons for which the first draft was thwarted, the intellectual history of the socio-economic rights being considered in Chilean constitutional debates, the myth of the pervasiveness of western constitutional ideas, and the role of international law in constitutionalism.