Nationalism, Sovereignty and Human Rights in the Transitional Central and East European States After Democratic Revolutions of 1989
16 Pages Posted: 26 Oct 2012
Date Written: October 2012
Abstract
In this short paper, presented to Tsinghua Forum on Law and Politics 2012 'Revolution(s): Polity, Rationality, and Modernity' Tsinghua Law School, Beijing 20-22 October 2012, I address a triangle of concepts: sovereignty, nationalism, and human rights, in a specific historical and geopolitical context: CEE states acceding to supranational entity (the European Union), shortly after shedding their dependence upon the Soviet empire. As far as sovereignty is concerned, I use a concept of 'sovereignty conundrum' which emerges from the fact that, after years of subjugation, CEE states have been sovereignty-hungry, and allergic to attempts to infringe their newly won independence. This could have created a strong obstacle to the accession to, and then smooth absorption into, the EU. As far as nationalism is concerned, I argue that it had potential to aggravate the force of sovereignty conundrum because, often, it was the most powerful force of social mobilization and state building in CEE after the fall of Communism. Finally, as far as human rights are concerned, I argue that the process of an expansive inclusion of fundamental rights into the agenda of the EU (best epitomized by the Charter of Fundamental Rights) greatly weakened the force of sovereignty conundrum because it allowed the EU to represent itself as a gentle, non-threatening, human rights oriented, values-infused community of democratic states. Both the constitutional academic doctrine and the case law of constitutional courts in the region employed devices and approaches which helped allay the concerns about the “loss of sovereignty” resultant upon the accession to the EU.
Keywords: Central Europe, constitutionalism, European Union, sovereignty, human rights
JEL Classification: K10, K30
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation