dangerous or, perhaps, because it is politically risky to invoke such powers
(that may even be a way to deWne stable democracies!). Or, perhaps the stable
democracies since the Second World War have simply been lucky enough
never to face a circumstance that was so threatening as to justify or even
require the use of emergency powers.
On the other hand, unstable or young democracies tend repeatedly to
resort to emergency powers, often as a way to protect or prolong the
incumbent government against political opponents. India, Pakistan, Nigeria,
and several Latin American countries—one can think of Colombia—have
repeatedly used constitutional emergency provisions during the last forty
years. We leave aside Israel, which, since its founding, has been living under a
constant threat, and where there has been a constant use of and a large debate
about emergency powers. The emergency powers employed there do not
seem to implement monocratic rule that is characteristic of other emergency
regimes.
It is worth noticing, conceptually, that the ‘‘dualistic’’ regime just described
has been regularly rejected by what we may call monistic or parliamentary
sovereignty constitutional systems (and their intellectual supporters). The
most prominent contemporary example is Great Britain, of course, but New
Zealand and the French Third Republic provide other examples of quasi-
monocratic systems. 19 Doctrines of uniWed sovereignty (we mean here con-
stitutional systems rejecting polyarchy with powers separated horizontally) in
two traditional versions—absolutism (Hobbes) and popular sovereignty (as-
sociated with Condorcet, and also Kelsen)—also tend to deny the need for
Emergency Powers or even to reject it as leading either to contradiction
(imperium in imperio)or to social disorder and civil war.
First, in ‘‘monocratic’’ systems (either strictly monocratic in Hobbes’s
sense, or else systems with a vertical and functional separation of powers so
that the legislature is the sovereign agency) there is no need to suspend
normal separations of power or human rights as these are not polyarchical
systems. If there is a need to suspend rights or consolidate powers to deal with
an emergency, all this can be managed eYciently by the sovereign body
itself—normally the legislature (like in the British parliamentary system).
Second, where legitimacy is based essentially on legal rules one needs legal
rules to suspend rights. If legitimacy is based on express consent (through the
19 It has to be clear that we are speaking from a purely constitutional point of view. UK and New
Zealand are plainly pluralistic political systems, but in both of them ‘‘parliamentary sovereignty’’
seems to be still the received doctrine (see Goldsworthy 2001 ).
340 john ferejohn & pasquale pasquino