Constitutionalism in Morocco: The Making of Kings’ Constitutions

This chapter focuses on constitution-making in the Kingdom of Morocco as a method for the king to ensure royal hegemony and his survival in the country’s turbulent postcolonial history and in contemporary politics. It is therefore a scholarly contribution to a case study that highlights the transition of a traditional state to a postcolonial state under a constitution influenced by the French colonial order, the Moroccan cultural order, and the Islamic religious order. The author argues that unlike all other North African countries, the postcolonial Moroccan state was built in 1955 with the aim of ensuring a powerless multiparty system and a powerful monarchy overseeing political competition between ethnic, class-based, and historically formed political fractions. This chapter examines how the different constitutions (1962, 1970, 1971, 1996, and 2011) served this objective and discusses the meaning of constitutionalism in the Moroccan context. Furthermore, it discusses the ways that prelegal norms have ensured the relative stability with which the Moroccan monarchy has achieved a supreme (if contested) role in Morocco’s political landscape.