Research on Taiwan New Constitution Movement －Opportunities and Limitations under Cross-Strait Relations
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Peng, Ai-Chiao
Abstract
“A New Constitution”, whether it is in its legal or political interpretation, represents a different significance; “A New Constitution for Taiwan”, especially, under the unique political, cultural, and historical backgrounds of the cross-strait relations, has evolved into a highly politically sensitive issue. Taiwan’s New Constitution movement began to spread in 1989, and regarding the dialectic between “Constitutional Amendment” and “Constitution-making”, due to the existence of the equivocality of words, the new constitution issue has often become a possibility for political battle in the domain of language communication. n September of 2006, President Chen Shui-bian for the first time proposed a “2006 Enactment of Taiwan New Constitution” idea, which immediately caused a big stir in the domestic, the cross-strait, as well as the international community. Taiwan’s New Constitution movement, whether it is in its social conditions, institutional conditions, or political conditions, all of these aspects are closely related to the stability of the Taiwan Strait. The push for a new constitution obviously touches China’s bottom-line of “Taiwan’s de jure independence”, mainly because a new constitution itself posses the meaning of declaration of national sovereignty. However, in June of 2005, Taiwan’s 7th Constitutional Amendment requires future constitutional changes to be approved by the majority of all eligible voters through a national referendum; China saw this move was for Taiwan to establish the foundations to formulate a constitution in the future, and thus in March of 2005, it took the initiative of enacting the Anti-Secession Law to express its strong resolution to stop Taiwan independence.n the opportunity and limitation aspects of the existence of a new Taiwan constitution under the framework of the cross-strait relations, this thesis proposes that the primary limitation lies in “Consensus has not been reached”; therefore, it is necessary to start from building common consensus within Taiwan, and among political leaders, as well as considering the reality issue of how to effectively resolve the external pressure coming from China and the United States. The second limitation is “Time is not Ripe”; Learning from previous years of constitution amendment experience, a rash push for enacting a new constitution before the public reaches a highly common consensus about the core values of a new constitution, can cause greater negative impacts. Therefore, this paper suggests that at the present stage, New Constitution advocates may change the issue at hand from the path of Secessionism to the path of Rationalism, to encourage the growth of the legitimacy and the legality of Taiwan New Constitution. Lastly, this thesis proposes the necessity of establishing an appreciation of democratic values that exceeds overlapping consensus, in order for Taiwan’s constitution changes to eventually march towards a benign development.
Subjects
A New Constitution for Taiwan
constitutional amendment
constitution-making
constitutional reengineering
cross-strait relations
Anti-Secession Law
consensus
Type
thesis
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