헌법개정의 당위와 방향

Abstract

This article aims to reckon the justifiability and directions of constitutional revision in Korean society at the time of December 2021. It starts with a review of the Korean discourse upon the successful prevention of COVID-19 epidemics in 2020. In the author’s perspective, the success of so-called ‘K-prevention’ was caused by the unintended political balance among three different generations of Korean society. However, the balance already includes numerous symptoms of collapse that demands very strongly the justifiability of constitutional revision in a grand scale. Through an analysis of the two failures in constitutional revision during the President Moon Jae-In’s administration, the author insists a new approach that focuses on the combination of the revision of constitutional text and the reform of constitutional acts such as the organizational acts of National Assembly, political party, government, court, and etc. For the directions of constitutional revision, the author mainly proposes three big agendas: the design of spatial check & balance between the political powers, the re-structuring of legislative and executive powers, and the raising of system-relevance in the judicial process. This also means a kind of roadmap in the Korean constitutional politics to make a majority-alliance for the constitutional revision by the political compromise between the so-called living powers in Korean society.