1989–2019: From democratic to abusive constitutional borrowing

Abstract

Abstract Constitutional borrowing looks very different today than it did thirty years ago: where in 1989, post-Soviet and Eastern European states were looking west for ideas and inspiration, today they are increasingly looking “eastward”—i.e. to Russia, China, and Singapore—for models of constitutional government. When they do look west, we argue, they are also doing so in increasingly “abusive ways”—i.e. in superficial, shallow, acontextual, or anti-purposive ways designed to use liberal democratic ideas and models not as inspiration but as justification for the erosion of minimum democratic norms and guarantees. This new mix of East-West influence is thus distinctly troubling from the perspective of a commitment to constitutional democracy.