Although the constitutional framework allowed for rival parties to control the executive and the legislature, the success of such an arrangement depends in large measure on a supple political culture that is sufficiently creative in re-imagining the conduct of democratic politics in line with the new reality. Thus when Sri Lanka embarked on the new project of political cohabitation, there was a vital need, to rationalise the values and realign the assumptions of democratic politics and constitutional government to suit a novel condition hitherto unfamiliar to Sri Lankan political parties. It might have been expected that notwithstanding the vicissitudes of the past, or even perhaps because of them, that a country that had enjoyed universal adult franchise and representative government since 1931 would rise to the occasion in re-conceptualising its politics.

The eventual and absolute failure of the Sri Lankan polity to adapt and redefine the conceptual boundaries of constitutional government, therefore, points to the extremely grave condition of its democratic imagination and the sickly nature of its political culture. The limitations of the Sinhala-Buddhist majority conception of democratic politics as essentially and simplistically majoritarian, and its inability to respond creatively to competing claims by minorities for a stake-holding in politics have been noted time and again by liberal scholars in Sri Lanka³. The inability of the majority polity to contemplate compromise and cooperation even in respect of adversaries from within the Sinhala power structure was illustrated with the failure of cohabitation.

The Sri Lankan experience in cohabitation did not, as some would have it, come to an abrupt end. It never even started. President Chandrika Kumaratunga found it exceedingly difficult to countenance a government that, in its initial stages, seemed to succeed in the cardinal issue upon which she had built her political career: negotiating an end to the ethnic conflict. Moreover, her claims of subterfuge on the part of the United National Front (UNF) government of the former Prime Minister and exclusion from the day to day conduct of the peace process have at least some validity. However, the President's characteristically strident manner in making these public criticisms only made the UNF government feel vindicated in their attitude towards her, and thereby exacerbated the deep level of mutual mistrust and suspicion in a situation that demanded quite the opposite.

These factors ensured that the notion of political cohabitation -- under any circumstances a difficult exercise requiring sincerity, commitment, an inventive political imagination and constant re-evaluation -- never took root in Sri Lanka.

By late 2003, the tensions of co-habitation in the south had reached crisis proportions. The President increasingly began asserting her authority, particularly with regard to what she perceived was the unduly permissive attitude towards the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), both of the UNF government and the Norwegian facilitators, as well as the Norwegian-led Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), which was the cease-fire monitoring body set up under the Cease-fire Agreement of 2002 (CFA)⁴. The President constantly pointed to frequent transgressions of the CFA by the LTTE in a number of respects including child recruitment, re-armament and military build-up, and the activities of the Sea Tigers, the naval arm of the LTTE. She asserted in this context, her constitutional duties and powers, as President and commander-in-chief, to safeguard the national security, territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Republic.

In anticipation of the LTTE's proposals on an interim administration and taking advantage of the respite offered by the suspension of direct talks since April 2003⁵, the President asked the Supreme Court for an advisory opinion⁶ on the question as to whether, in terms of the provisions of the Constitution, the portfolio of defence needs to be held by the President and not by any other member of the cabinet of ministers. It was thus becoming clear that the President was laying a legal and constitutional basis for an act of political confrontation with the UNF government. As widely speculated, the Supreme Court advised the President that, in terms of the Constitution, the subject of defence was required to be under the President, although she may allocate a portion of the portfolio or delegate some of its functions to another person⁷.

The publication of the LTTE's Interim Self-governing Authority (ISGA)⁸ proposals and the widespread apprehensions it caused in the Sinhala South gave the President the needed excuse to make a decisive move against the UNF government. On 4th November 2003, three days after the ISGA proposals were unveiled and when the Prime Minister was away on a visit to the United States, the President dramatically dismissed the ministers of defence, interior and media.

The Prime Minister returned to Sri Lanka several days later to a tumultuous welome by the public. It appeared that the President's gamble had failed and that public sympathy had shifted to Prime Minister Wickramasinghe in the ministry takeover episode. However, the UNF reaction was not one of retaliation; the Prime Minister seemed to feel that, given the public show of confidence in him, the President would be suitably chastened and reverse the takeover. This expectation of contrition on the part of the President was hugely misplaced. President Kumaratunga made a tactical retreat in offering to hand over some parts of the defence portfolio back to UNF control. In the negotiations between officials that followed, various options for a compromise on the defence issue were discussed⁹. The President desired at least some oversight role over the defence portfolio, not so much in pursuit of constitutional propriety as for some measure of political face saving, whilst the Prime Minister was adamant in his instance that he needed to retain full control of the defence ministry in order to pursue the peace process. Due to these irreconcilable positions, the 'Mano-Malik' talks collapsed in early 2004.

Party Interests and Electoral Issues
The political setting for any type of further cooperation between the UNF and the President had, by January 2004, deteriorated beyond any hope. The idea of an anti-UNF coalition between the People’s Alliance (PA) and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) had been mooted by several prominent members of both parties during the course of 2003 and the breakdown of the Mano-Malik talks paved the way for the alliance to be formalised. On 20th January 2004, the Sri Lankan Freedom Alliance (SLFP) and JVP concluded the agreement which brought into being the United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA). The alliance included several other constituent parties of the PA. While the electoral advantage of coalescing against the UNF is immediately apparent, the President herself was reported to have been reluctant to forge an alliance with the JVP for several reasons.

These concerns were with regard to the JVP's perspectives on the ethnic conflict and the means and modalities of its resolution. The most significant ground of disagreement related to the JVP's antipathy to devolution and power-sharing and corresponding insistence on the unitary character of the state. The JVP held that a limited measure of administrative decentralisation was sufficient to meet the legitimate demands of the minorities¹⁰. In a public statement issued on the occasion of the UPFA's inauguration, these two inconsistent positions between the constituents were reproduced.

On 7th February 2004, the President dissolved the Twelfth Parliament, fixing the date of the general election for 2nd April 2004. As the campaign got underway, the UNF canvassed the people on a platform of continuity in the peace process (along the principles enunciated in the Oslo Declaration of 2002 and the Tokyo Declaration of 2003) and its programme of economic reforms that was projected over a period of six years. They claimed responsibility for turning around the economy and pointed to the steadily increasing growth rates recorded during their administration.

The UPFA's electoral campaign focussed on the four key public policy areas relevant to any Sri Lankan election during the recent past. These were the economy, the peace process and a negotiated settlement to the ethnic conflict and constitutional reform.

Peace and Governance
During 2002 and early 2003, the peace process, while imperfect in many respects, was making progress, super-exceeding any previous attempt at talks in the history of the conflict. The highpoint in the UNF's pursuit of the peace process came on 5th December 2002, when the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) issued a joint statement following their third round of talks in Oslo in which they articulated the framework principles around which the negotiations towards a final political settlement would proceed. The key features of the Oslo Declaration¹¹ are that the parties committed to fundamental restructuring of the State that set out the hitherto unthinkable vision of a united and federal future Sri Lanka. The reference to the right to 'internal self-determination' of Tamils in areas of their historical habitation indicated that a high degree of asymmetrical autonomy to the Northeast was contemplated within the future federation.

By April 2003, however, the LTTE suspended their participation in the talks citing the failure to meet the urgent humanitarian and rehabilitation needs of the people of the Northeast by the sub-committees set up for that purpose¹². The LTTE insisted that immediate reconstruction, rehabilitation and resettlement needs of the people of Northeast had to be addressed as imperative concerns in order that public support in the Northeast towards the talks are sustained. For these purposes, the LTTE stressed the necessity of the setting up of an interim administration in the Northeast under their control¹³.

The LTTE, in suspending their participation, indicated to the government that they would be willing to consider any appropriate proposal that the government may present with regard to an interim administration. In July 2003, the government presented to the LTTE, through the Norwegian facilitators, a framework proposal that sought to set up a provisional authority for the Northeast as an administrative arrangement. This authority while giving a pre-eminent place to the LTTE was to function under the Prime Minister's office. The LTTE then set about formulating a detailed response to the government's proposal. The nature of the exercise, however, made it clear that in effect they were seeking to present a set of comprehensive counter-proposals to the government. The LTTE undertook a lengthy process of consultations not only on the ground in the Northeast, but in a high profile series of meetings held in Paris, Oslo and Dublin. At these meetings, they consulted members of the Tamil Diaspora who were acknowledged experts in the fields of constitutional and international law, political science and economics, in addition to other international experts in conflict resolution and constitution-making. The result of these deliberations was the LTTE's proposals for an Interim Self-Governing Authority (ISGA) for the Northeast, or ISGA proposals, that were announced on 1st November 2003¹⁴.

The ISGA proposals have been described as outlining in maximalist terms, the aspirations of the Tamils as articulated by the LTTE. It was a mix of what the LTTE aspired to in terms of powers and functions of an interim administrative structure, and salient substantive elements of a political settlement to the ethnic conflict. In design, therefore, it resembled a highly autonomous entity akin to a confederate unit rather than a reflection of what was understood to be the federalist spirit of the Oslo Declaration even where the latter contemplated asymmetrical federalism.

As a negotiating ploy, there is nothing inherently objectionable in one party setting out their objectives at optimum, with the necessary implication that they would need to negotiate downwards at the table. The deliberate obfuscation of the line between what constitutes 'interim' and 'final' may be similarly explained.

The long preamble to the document detailed a litany of grievances, mostly legitimate problems that have been in the public domain for years, around which the Tamil nationalist struggle was commenced and shaped. The preamble also alluded to the principles around which the Tamil national question may be resolved to the satisfaction of the Tamils. In normative content, the document was solidly nationalist embodying arguments around collective rights such as self-determination. Although the document contained some references to human rights and democracy, it is not cynical to say, given the LTTE's subjective conception of democracy and individual rights that this was to secure wider acceptability. The provisions for democracy and pluralism are subordinated to the wider project of ethno-nationalism that permeates the document.

In terms of structural content, the proposals required the establishment of an Interim Self Governing Authority that would exercise the plenary political powers of the people of the Northeast in respect of a wide range issues. Its jurisdiction was defined broadly, with strategic ambiguities clearly favouring autonomy of the ISGA.

The reception of the ISGA proposals in the South reflected their nature as the maximalist articulation of a particular position represented in the peace process. The UNF government, anxious to recommence direct talks, interpreted the ISGA proposals as a basis for discussion with the implicit intention of whittling them down through negotiation. The President's Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) however, in a detailed statement on 6th November 2003, wholly rejected the ISGA proposals as an attempt to lay down the legal foundations of a future, separate, sovereign State. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the third force in Sri Lanka politics and purveyors of a hard-line brand of Sinhala nationalism, also totally repudiated the proposals, stating that the proper response to them was to consign them to the dustbin.

In this way, a substantial representation of southern political opinion failed to constructively engage with a serious set of propositions laid down by the other side of the deep divide. Several problematic features of the southern political discourse are brought to light by this.

The President's SLFP-led People's Alliance (PA) and the former Prime Minister's United National Party (UNP)-led United National Front (UNF) are conspicuous by their congruity at the policy level. In this sense, the Sri Lanka party political system resembles the west, wherein political competition is most intense in the battle for the centre. However in Sri Lanka the 'centre' is an elusive territory that the two parties sometimes contemporaneously occupy, depending on who is more 'radical' or 'conservative' on a given issue. Thus the political centre is elastic at the same time as it is nebulous in that the centre in the popular conception is non-epistemological, and may include nationalism as well as pragmatism, or deregulation (as a feature of the commitment to the free market) as well as protectionism (as an aspect of social democracy). Neither of these political or economic debates is understood in Sri Lankan democracy as even remotely dichotomous, which is what makes centrist party political behaviour so difficult to subject to western-style epistemological understanding.

This is perhaps to be expected in an essentially conservative polity, which chooses governments on personalities and immediate mundane issues, rather than on ideology or conviction or rational persuasion. It is thus no surprise that while the conservative ontology can quite comfortably accommodate nationalism, which thrives on either side of the ethnic divide, both liberals and Marxists have learnt that doctrinal rigour must be sacrificed at the altar of electoral success.

On the question of the ethnic conflict and means of its resolution, the positions of the PA and UNF were closely aligned. Both agree that there is no military solution to the conflict and that a political settlement must be negotiated between principally the government and the LTTE. Both parties recognise that third party facilitation is necessary in the peace process, and have recognised Norway as best-placed to play that role. That a fundamental restructuring of the state with substantial devolution to the regions is central to a successful political settlement is also agreed.

It would thus appear that there were wide areas of congruence on which the PA and the UNF could have come to an interest-based accommodation for the purposes, at least, of the peace process, if not a comprehensive agenda for cohabitation government. The fact that this did not happen, points to the zero-sum nature of Sri Lankan democracy in which political parties cannot conceive of sharing credit for popular achievements. This culture is so pervasive that it has been part of the improperly rationalised democratic value system upon which the institutional structure of the Sri Lankan State, in its several incarnations, has been grounded since independence. It continues to ensure that succeeding generations are continuously robbed of opportunities at remedying that anomalous value system, as a part of making the state work for citizens as a whole, rather than the political class which controls public institutions.

The dominance of this narrow conception of democracy as zero-sum and majoritarian when applied to ethnic divisions between the majority community of Sinhalese and primarily the Tamil minority (but applicable to other majority -minority relationships such as the relations between Northeastern Tamils and Eastern Muslims as well) has resulted historically in the majority being unable to meaningfully respond to and engage with the concerns and aspirations of the minorities. The peremptory dismissal of the ISGA proposals, thus, constitutes the latest in a long string of rejections of legitimate demands that minorities have made with regard to democratic participation and representation.

The tragic paradox is that, and international parallels to Sinhala Buddhist nationalism abound, the inexorable outcome of an attitude of uncompromising majoritarianism is the precise opposite of what the majority nationalism in multicultural polities seeks to achieve. As the experiences in such ethnically divided societies, such as the former Yugoslavia, and indeed the deconstructions of the Sri Lankan polity in non-nationalist discourses demonstrate, the more stubborn the majority's rejection of minority accommodation as an aspect of its own insecurity, the more virulent the resistance. Thus the very groups in the South that are most emotionally wedded to the notion of a politically united island, are indeed the groups that are incapable of a more enlightened attitude of interest-based accommodation that will truly ensure political unity of the island polity in the future.

With regard to the peace process, the parties were inclined to take a broadly similar approach, although with the advent of the JVP into alliance with the PA, there was some rhetorical upping of the ante with regard to the scope and nature of the Norwegian facilitation role, the LTTE's insistence that they are the sole representatives of the Tamil vis-à-vis negotiations, and its ISGA proposals as the basis for recommencing talks. Notwithstanding the JVP continuing to advocate the shibboleth of unity equated to unitarism, the President seems to have been confident that she would be in a position either to persuade the JVP of the hard realities of the conflict or to present a negotiated settlement involving substantial devolution as a fait accompli.

The JVP's obdurately unitarian constitutional imagination is informed most potently by the powerful idiom of the Sinhala nationalism it espouses, but it also retains a fair degree of Marxist contempt for political institutions of representative democracy. While they insist that notwithstanding their revolutionary past they are now fully committed to the democratic process, the fact that their conception of democracy is so simplistically majoritarian denotes that any perceived obstacle, constitutional or otherwise, to majoritarian decision-making represents an irritant that must promptly be swept away on a tide of populism. In this way, institutional features of representative and deliberative democracy such as parliamentary procedures and proportional representation have come under attack by the JVP as illicit hindrances to the will of (the majority of) the people. Taken together with the fact that the JVP's constituency is exclusively Southern -- and almost entirely Sinhalese -- this means that its constitutional imagination is constricted and monolithic incapable of absorbing the dynamism of creative ideas and new structures that have been fashioned elsewhere in the world for dealing with competing ethnic claims for political power.

In the General Elections of 2004, the JVP faced a stiff challenge in the representation of this constituency of the Southern polity from a new contender in the form of the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU). This is a new political formation of Buddhist monks who directly contested the elections on a platform of supremacist Sinhala Buddhism. The ideology of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism which is well entrenched in the Southern polity, drawing sustenance from a rich hagiographical account of historical glory, sees the island as the 'Dharmadveepa', the last bastion of pure Theravada Buddhism, and the Sinhalese as a chosen people to whom the Buddha is supposed to have issued a dying injunction to protect and foster the Dharma (faith). Accordingly, the raison d'etre of politics is the theocratic objective of establishing a 'Dharma Rajya': a holy state founded upon Buddhist canons. This is problematic at a theological level because Buddhism's purpose and subject is essentially individual salvation for the karmic cycle, not the organisation of political power. However, the ideology of the political monk has less to do with Buddhism and more to do with the political evolution of Sinhala society, particularly in its late 19th Century revivalism in response to British colonialism¹⁵.

The peace process as pursued by the UNF administration heightened fear among the Sinhalese constituency of the JVP/JHU that this world view was in the process of being irretrievably destroyed. It was in the electoral interests of both the JVP and the JHU, individually and in terms of their political competition, therefore that these fears were played up and exploited. Their success in doing so is reflected in unprecedented levels of parliamentary representation for both in the current Parliament.

Position on the Economy
As with their similarity of approach to conflict resolution, the likeness of the PA and the UNF in respect of the economy is also striking. Both are committed to the market economy and private sector initiative, with differences being essentially on emphasis. The PA is more social democratic in outlook while the UNF is more free market oriented.

On the economy, the UPFA attacked the UNF's doctrinaire programme of economic liberalisation embodied in the 'Regaining Sri Lanka' document¹⁶, and claimed that the capitalism of the kind promoted by the UNF benefited only the affluent. They struck a resonant chord among a wide constituency of Sri Lankans belonging to the lower middle class, working class, and the peasantry who had been impacted by welfare and government spending cutbacks and the greatly expected dividends of the cessation in hostilities and the economic growth had not yet borne fruit. The fact that the UPFA won the argument on the economic issues is noteworthy for several reasons. Firstly, the UNP has been traditionally perceived as the party of economic competence. Secondly, the UNF government, in undertaking tough structural reforms and tight fiscal discipline, made the fatal mistake of not taking the people into confidence; explaining to them why the measures were necessary, with what objectives and the case for patience in the interim before the measures were meant to deliver the results in tangible terms to the people. This allowed the UNF's opponents to exploit the people's sense of alienation and disgruntlement to maximum benefit.

Thirdly, and most significantly, the UNF's failure to take the people with them on their economic programme, points not merely to that party's unsuccessful public relations, but also to the nature of the polity's expectations of the state in the economic life of the community. In the political imagination of the people, the state is seen as both protector and patron, and as such attitudes towards the state are relatively munificent. This is in contrast to most modern constitutional states in which dominant constitutive assumptions with regard to state formation are by nature suspicious of political power and its wielders, particularly in relation to the economic freedom of individuals. Therefore, any administration that is inclined towards deregulation, competition, global capital, and wants to cut back welfare, subsidies, and government spending, runs the risk of appearing uncaring.

Previous UNP administrations that boasted of economic accomplishment have achieved that success through a mixture of authoritarianism and steam rolling through opposition against reforms, and targeted programmes at alleviating the conditions of the poor. The last UNF administration lacked control of the decisive institution of executive political power: the presidency, which prevented it from sustaining unpopular reforms through to fruition. On the other hand, the growth and development strategies of the last UNF administration did not seem to focus on the poor in the way its predecessors had done, with the result that its economic policy lost the wider popular support among wage-earners, public sector employees and the rural population. Given the fact that up until the last day of the campaign, the UNF was leading the opinion polls -- being seen as better suited to pursue the peace process, the conclusion arrived at by most post-electoral analyses that it lost the election on the economic issues is persuasive.

By contrast, the UPFA came up with a wildly populist set of promises on welfare measures that an electorate less naïve about macroeconomics would have scoffed at. But the fact that notwithstanding the incredible, implausible nature of those promises, the people endorsed the programme points not merely to ignorance. It is a telling example of the common man's perception of the ideal-typical role of the state in his life.

The politicisation of Sri Lankan society occurred largely at the hands of Marxists as an aspect of the latter's anti-colonial political mobilisation agenda in the pre-independence period. Even, thereafter, when it was clear that in Sri Lanka independence merely meant the transfer of power from one elite to another, the Marxist influence on popular mobilisation is clearly evident. The nature of the communist state is very similar to the paradigm of statehood in the collective social memory of pre-colonial politics in Sinhala society. The state is big, generous, a protector and patron, and political relations are essentially clientalist. The latter characteristic is not part of the Marxist 'scripture', but was an empirical truth in many communist societies. In post-colonial Sri Lanka, the 'bourgeois' parties, the SLFP and UNP, merely exploited the primordial and clientalist political notions of the people, as later shaped by communist expectations to their advantage, by indulging in generous welfare programmes. Here we mean not justified investment in health, education and infrastructure that the post-colonial nation-building project must necessarily undertake, but improvident spending on direct hand-outs unlinked to productivity or efficiency, and in the extreme form of government subsidies on consumer goods and services.

This culture of dependency on state intervention in the life of the community is so pervasive and deep rooted that a successful reversal of the state's role must, perforce, be accompanied by a massive attitudinal sea-change on the part of the electorate. If Sri Lanka is to see the naissance of the free market, not as the economic policy of the government for the time being, but in its more normative importance as an aspect of genuine political liberty and individual autonomy, then mere statutory deregulation howsoever far-reaching is inadequate. It is in this context that the UNF's defeat on the economic issues may be explained.

Constitutional Reform
The last major issue of the general elections of April 2004 was the scheme put forward by the UPFA for constitutional reform. The UPFA, whose manifesto asked the people for a mandate to effect these changes, wants to abolish the executive presidency and to reform the current proportional representation electoral system in a way that it brings in a first past the post element. Both of these propositions suffer from a legitimacy deficit. It is clear that the abolition of the executive presidency is to enable Chandrika Kumaratunga to remain in politics after 2005, when her second and, in terms of the Constitution, final term of office comes to an end. The tampering with the electoral system is even more alarming, given that in our imperfect constitutional scheme with respect to minority accommodation, proportional representation is one of the more positive features. However, the most disquieting aspect of the UPFA's agenda for constitutional change is the mooted extra-constitutional process by which change is sought to be made.

The Constitution of 1978, rigid in nature, requires, for its repeal and replacement, a two-thirds majority in parliament, and subsequently, the consent of the people at a referendum¹⁷. Since no single party can obtain a two-thirds majority of seats in parliament under the proportional representation system the UPFA, which received 45.6 per cent of the total votes, has proposed that on the basis of the general election mandate, a constituent assembly should be called in order to ratify the changes to the constitution. This is in short, a constitutional revolution¹⁸. In historical terms, a constitutional revolution, where an existing legal order is replaced through unconstitutional means by a new order, has occurred most commonly in one of two situations; the second of which is more justifiable than the first.

The first is where the legal order is overthrown by a revolution, a coup d'etat, or some such other means of usurpation, and the courts, the administration and the people are confronted with an unpalatable political reality that they must rationalise. In these situations, the courts have done so by reference to the doctrine of necessity, wherein the usurpation is accepted, with or without conditions, as political fact. The principal test is that of efficacy: has the old order been so comprehensively destroyed and the new one taken its place so completely that it is futile to insist on the illegality of the latter? Inspirational examples of flourishing democracies where the courts have had to legitimise such regimes have included Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Uganda, Nigeria and, on several different occasions, Pakistan. Jurisprudentially, the doctrine of necessity is grounded on Kelsen's pure theory of law, wherein the ‘Grundnorm’, i.e., the ultimate norm from which the entire legal system derives its authority may be replaced by another, with the only test for the legality of the latter being its efficacy, i.e., the totality of the success with which it has replaced the former. Kelsen formulated a theoretically pure concept of law in contradistinction to natural law theory, in particular, and liberal schools of evolutionary jurisprudence, in general. In doing so, he quite naturally left any notion of political morality out of his concept of law. To the liberals and the democrats who believe in the intensely human, and therefore, moral notion of spontaneous order and its gradual evolution as the historical wellspring of modern legal systems, Kelsen's pure theory of law and its deplorable doctrinal progeny are repugnant.

The second occasion of constitutional revolution is when nations exercise their autochthony. This is where colonial or semi-colonial communities seek a complete severance of their constitutional links with the imperial power as a symbol and demonstration of absolute independence. Thus they would abrogate a constitutional order derived from the imperial legislature and devise a new order that derives its authority directly from the people. Deliberately, therefore, the amending procedures of the colonial constitutions are disregarded and new mechanisms and procedures, most commonly a constituent assembly directly elected for the purpose of drafting a new constitution, coupled with a referendum to ratify the product are adopted. The best example of this is the promulgation of the Constitution of the Irish Free State in 1937. In 1972, Sri Lanka also exercised its autochthony, although in more problematic circumstances in that the constituent assembly mechanism was de-legitimatised by spatial constraints on participation, particularly of ethnic minorities.