Constitutionalism, Democracy, and State Decay
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Description
The hazy mirror with which philosophy reflects its times has cracked under the impact of the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. Basic concepts and norms, models and paradigms, anxieties and aspirations, have had to be and are being fundamentally challenged in light of the dizzying and unforeseen events of the past decade. As a Polish journalist recently remarked, in 1989 most of us thought that good had conquered evil (that we had achieved a liberal revolution). What we have instead is a return to Chicago in the 1920s. The intellectual and moral shock of this sort of turnabout has still not been fully absorbed, over there or over here. Nonetheless, a significant transformation of ideas and values has occurred. Previously idealized social patterns, such as markets and community, are gradually acquiring new and not entirely positive reputations. Both instrumental-monetized exchange and emotional-moral solidarity, both border-crossing arms smuggling and border-smashing tribalisms, now rouse new worries in the public mind. The fire sale of the Soviet military inventory, not to mention the unregulated market in ground-to-air missiles, it is fair to say, cause as much apprehension as Bosnia style sub-group loyalty gone insane. So what are the main lessons that transitology, in its current form, can teach political theorists? What do we learn when a system of power crumbles, and a state of nature with highly educated and understandably apprehensive inhabitants emerges, right before our eyes? More concretely, what can constitutional and democratic theorists learn from the unthinkable collapse of state institutions, especially in Russia, but also throughout the postcommunist world? What will the study of criminalization and tribalization, kleptocracy and territorial unraveling, do to our basic categories and questions? It is still too soon to answer this question in a confident manner. But a number of conceptual reorientations or subtle shifts of emphasis in both constitutional and democratic theory can already be perceived.
Source Publication
Deliberative Democracy and Human Rights
Source Editors/Authors
Harold Hongju Koh, Ronald C. Slye
Publication Date
1999
Recommended Citation
Holmes, Stephen, "Constitutionalism, Democracy, and State Decay" (1999). Faculty Chapters. 806.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/806
