Publications of Kis, J.

Constitutional Precommitment Revisited

The article focuses on the issue of constitutional precommitment. It discusses the precommitment model and outlines the assumptions and arguments related to it. It tackles the accountability of decision-making bodies such as legislators and justices and argues on the compatibility of judicial review to democratic self-government. It concludes that justice review is compatible with democratic self-governance and delivers better decision than local institutions.

Beyond the Nation State.

This article examines the concept of the nation state. Liberal nationalism is also nationalism. Its goal is a unified nation state. However, the means at its disposal do not include persecuting the use of minority languages, prohibiting minority culture, expelling members of the minority from their domiciles or destroying them. The meeting of liberalism and nationalism promised a happy union. The liberal doctrine seemed capable of reconciling nationalism's democratic and egalitarian impulses with its discriminatory policy with respect to minorities. The distinction between nation and nationalities was only one of a number of dimensions in which liberalism tried to harmonize equality before the state with individual freedom.

Between reform and revolution : three hypotheses about the nature of the regime change

In the European region of the Russian world system, rapid, unforeseen and far-reaching changes took place in 1989/90. Within no time, the constitutional order was radically transformed. Not only were the political institutions of parliamentary government and of the rule of law born almost overnight, but private property was emancipated and the legal framework for a capitalist economy was established. True, the actual transformation of property relations and social conditions is not that spectacular. Its course is controversial, its forms distorted, and its rhythm unsatisfactory. Aim with this article is to try to dissolve the paradox of "refolution." The author will attempt to explore the features of the 1989/90 Eastern European transition process which locate it between reform and revolution. He hopes to succeed in defining a specific type of social and political transformation; by so doing, he hopes also to provide new perspectives for understanding other already familiar and well described types. Borrowing from the terminology of the 1989/90 Hungarian opposition, the author will call the type falling between reform and revolution a regime change.