Download This PaperPost-Soviet Constitution Making
"Post-Soviet Constitution-Making" in Hanna Lerner and David Landau (eds), Comparative Constitution Making, Edward Elgar Publishing (2019), pp. 539-566
28 Pages Posted: 12 Jul 2019 Last revised: 1 May 2020
Date Written: July 12, 2019
Abstract
This chapter will examine why many of the countries in the post-Soviet space – which spans eight time zones from Western Ukraine to the Russian Far East and has a population of around 300 million – continue to diverge from divided state constitutionalism. This divergence stems from the persistent influence of a competing constitutional discourse embedded in the region’s contested constitutional tradition. This distinctive discourse argues that a constitution should centralize state power and retain the political supervision of legality to fulfill particular collective goals. This “centralized state discourse” therefore competes with divided state constitutionalism to shape constitutional text and implementation across the post-Soviet space.
Keywords: post-Soviet, constitutional law
JEL Classification: K39
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