Civic Confucianism and Democratic Constitutionalism in East Asia

Confucian Constitutionalism can be seen as aiming to translate constitutional democracy into the vernacular cultural language of East Asia: “Confucian democratic constitutionalism invites them to reformulate their constitutional identity and public morality in mediation of Confucian civic culture that is still in play in their social, legal, and political lives but for the institutional expression of which they lack an adequate language” (204). The importance of this task is twofold. The first is that the relatively young democracies of East Asia are frequently characterized by an “incongruence between the formal liberal constitutional order and the Confucian civic culture that continues to inform people’s moral reasoning and judgment” (203–4) and yet, as Jürgen Habermas puts it, constitutional rights must be “enduringly linked with the motivations and convictions of the citizens, for without such a motivational anchoring they could not become the driving force behind the dynamically conceived project of producing an association of free and equal individuals.” 1 The second reason this matters is that a significant strand of Confucian political theory—so-called “meritocratic” theories—offers a competing ideal which is not democratic in character. To the extent that these vernacular political theories can get a grip on East Asian societies, they are liable to increase the dissonance between the formal institutional order and the background civic culture in democratic states and weaken the forces of democratization in authoritarian states. Hence Kim aims to provide both the conceptual resources for, and an attractive ideal of, Confucian democratic constitutionalism as well as a critical perspective on Confucian political meritocracy.