Differing Dynamics of Semipresidentialism across Euro/Eurasian Borders: Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova, and Armenia

Abstract

Abstract: The postcommunist countries that chose semipresidential regimes can be divided into three territorial units. First, the Commonwealth of Independent States countries chose semipresidentialism as a natural evolution of Communist executive diarchy and an instrument to run clientelist politics. New European Union countries (Poland and Lithuania) largely lacked these conditions but found other reasons for semipresidentialism: as a counterbalance against populist tendencies in postcommunist politics and as a mechanism to cultivate newcomers in politics. It is in the border regions between Eurasia and (in this article Armenia and Moldova) where semipresidential regimes cannot consolidate and continue to experience constant constitutional instability. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine resulted in constitutional amendments that violated constitutional procedural requirements and thus provided another example that the apparent enlargement of Europe tends to destabilize constitutional processes. Key words: clientelism, EU expansion, institutional choice, Orange Revolution, postcommunist transition, semipresidentialism Introduction The collapse of Communist regimes provoked scholarly interest in semipresidentialism not only because the overwhelming majority of postcommunist countries chose this type of regime, (1) but also because the collapse of Communist regimes provided another source of semipresidential constitutional arrangements, namely, executive diarchies existing under Communist one-party regimes. As Maurice Duverger noted, semipresidentialism is somewhat similar to Soviet administrative law, in that executive power is divided into strategic and managerial functions. In the Soviet Union, these functions were run by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the government, respectively. (2) Moreover, when semipresidential regimes emerged, particularly in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, the political elite recognized that this regime fit the clientelistic characteristics of their countries' politics. Under semipresidentialism, the president enjoys abundant potential to manipulate elite clans by exploiting his prerogative to appoint and dismiss prime ministers. Thus, if a number of countries in various parts of the world consciously imported the 1962 French constitution, the evolution of Communist executive diarchies into semipresidential regimes would be an indigenous, natural process. (3) It is symptomatic that the term semipresidentialism entered the lexicon of the political and judicial sciences of postcommunist countries only after they adopted semipresidential constitutions. In a previous article on Ukrainian semipresidentialism, I described this typically Eurasian, natural development from Communist executive diarchy to postcommunist semipresidentialism. (4) Yet this was not the only possible scenario for postcommunist countries. It is true that the Communist method of dividing strategic and managerial functions of executive power affected constitutional debate, even in the western part of the former socialist countries, for example, in Poland. However, the revolutionary characteristics of the transition of western postcommunist countries did not allow for a smooth transition of Communist executive diarchy to semipresidentialism. As a result, there are a number of countries where the 1962 French constitution, another source of semipresidentialism, affected constitutional processes, at least temporarily. The semipresidential choices in these countries, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia (after 1998), cannot be attributed to either a Communist legacy or postcommunist clientalism. In a previous article I coauthored with Liutauras Gudzinskas, a Lithuanian political scientist, we explained Lithuania's semipresidential choice by the preference of the population for strongman rule and a concrete balance of power among the elites during the preparation of a semipresidential constitution. …