Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe: An Introduction

Abstract

Since 1989, seven countries in Eastern Europe have undertaken the transition from one-party rule to constitutional democracy: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Six of the seven are currently rewriting their constitutions. The exception is Hungary, although that country's constitution is very much a patchwork, and new constitutional efforts can be expected there, too, within the next few years. In addition, several of the constituent republics are writing or revising their constitutions, including the Czech and the Slovak Lands in Czechoslovakia and Croatia and Slovenia in Yugoslavia. Finally, the German Democratic Republic had made some progress toward creating a new constitution before the process was overtaken by unification. Altogether, therefore, we are dealing with at least a dozen constitution-making processes. This wave of constitution-making is not altogether unique. In the late 1700s, the individual American states, the United States itself, and France enacted a series of democratic constitutions. The wave of revolutions in 1848 also included brief constitutional epi-