Constitutional Control of Foreign Affairs and Strategic Risk: Morocco and Germany in Comparative Perspective

This article examines how constitutional law structures foreign-affairs decision-making under conditions of strategic risk through a comparative analysis of Morocco and Germany. It argues that foreign affairs should not be conceived as a sphere lying beyond law merely because they are shaped by urgency, uncertainty, and geopolitical pressure. On the contrary, they constitute a particularly revealing site of constitutional ordering, since they expose how legal systems organize the exercise of external power when the need for effective action is at its highest. Adopting a doctrinal and comparative public-law approach, the article analyses the allocation of foreign-affairs powers, the legal filters governing executive action, and the forms of parliamentary participation and judicial review that frame accountability in each system, with particular attention to military deployments, sanctions and embargoes, energy-security arrangements, and migration instruments. The article shows that the central divergence between Morocco and Germany lies not in the existence of legal constraint, but in its structure, timing, and institutional location. Germany reflects a model of dense ex ante legality, characterized by prior authorization, procedural discipline, review mechanisms, and, where relevant, the normative force of European Union law. Morocco operates within a more centralized constitutional architecture in which executive predominance is combined with treaty-based controls, constitutionally defined forms of parliamentary assent, and the possibility of prior constitutional review. The article ultimately proposes a comparative framework for assessing legality in foreign affairs under strategic pressure.