1987년 헌법으로의 개정논의 과정－정당정치 과정에 수렴된 논의를 중심으로－

32 years since the current constitution (often considered to be the prime monument of the 1987 Civil Uprising) has come into existence, inquiries into how the revision was accomplished in the context of party politics are scarce. This article attempts to uncover the process as an entirety as detailed as possible, and to make an assessment thereon. With this in mind, the author first overviews the political and institutional backgrounds that prevented discussions on constitutional revision until April 1986, and proceeds to describe the processes in which ruling and opposing parties prepared their constitutional drafts after Chun Government had chosen to inaugurate a parliamentary system instead of maintaining the existing constitution, and in which the actual interparty ‘discussion’ failed nonetheless, contrasting them with the process following the 1987 Civil Uprising in which the parties, through negotiation in the Eight-men Political Talks and National Assembly Special Committee for Constitutional Revision, formulated the single final draft. As a conclusion, the author assesses the above discussing process culminating in the 1987 Constitution as something worth avoiding to repeat in the future, in spite of its significance as an achievement of the imperative that the previous political system had to be abolished. He points out that no ingenuous discussion was possible when both the ruling and the opposing parties had concealed their true political intent in 1986, which in turn made them have to make a debate focusing hastily on the chance of regime change but otherwise meager, sacrificing all values of consistency, openness, and universality of consent. This precedent, he argues, gives us a lesson that any future discussion ought to be more open to extensive public participation.