La question locale dans le débat constitutionnel au Cameroun: chassé-croisé entre unité et pluralisme/ created by Hélène-Laure Menthong

The socio-political history of the constitutional reform begun in Cameroon in 1991 and completed on January 18, 1996 reveals the bitterness of the struggles for the definition of the local problem in terms of legitimacy, identity and autonomy, as one of the major challenges of the democratic transition. Despite the ferment of rupture and the resurgence of ethnicism, regionalism and 'autonomic fever', the partition and dislocation of the State did not take place, although such a solution is not excluded. The debate on the local question leads to the reconfiguration of the unitary State in the sense of a new balance of tensions between the center and the periphery where the region poses itself as a framework for decentralization. The mystique of the unitary state now operates differently within the framework of a 'loose national identity'. The discourse on decentralization, regionalism, federation and even secession through the constitutional debate marks the anchoring, the rooting of the culture of the State. Identity particularisms, far from signifying the negation of the State, are its consecration since it is an issue for the control of a dominant center, a given space, the State.