Rule of What Law? Authoritarian Pasts, Liberal Politics and Constitutional Imagination in Early Post-Communist East Central Europe

The project of constitutional democracy and the rule of law concept served as a powerful unifying platform for political compromise during the liberal democratic transformation after 1989. Today’s challenge to the liberal rule of law calls for re-evaluating our understanding of that period. To provide a deeper historical perspective, this chapter offers a tentative historical typology of the various rule of law understandings of the period of ‘liberal consensus.’ First, it outlines the historical roots of the 1989 democratic and constitutional revolutions in ECE, pointing out their major sources, namely the import of Western constitutional theory, dissident human rights activism, and the mostly neglected yet critical authoritarian socialist constitutionalism. Second, the chapter analyses the politics of liberal constitutionalism, in the 1990s, from the point of view of its internal diversity, depending on the different political ideas and ideologies behind it. The variety of constitutional imagination sets the stage for the final step, which is the exploration of different rule of law conceptions, namely neoliberal, substantive, positivist and non-liberal. Although transnational in its perspective, the last section, for the sake of concision and clarity, focuses primarily on the Czech context.