Ethno-Nationalized States of Eastern Europe: Is There a Constitutional Alternative?

This paper discusses a set of issues which are all focused on the following question: what needs to be done in order to promote democratic stability in multi-national states1 of post-communist South-East Europe? I believe that in most of these countries2 democratic stability has not yet been achieved. I also believe that this is to an important extent due to the inappropriately formulated and developed relationship between majority nation and national minorities. Claiming ‘inappropriateness’ suggests a breach in the standard that we could provisionally name a democratically appropriate relationship between national majority and minorities. I will argue that this standard is normative and that it should be read as a set of universally acceptable principles. For the purpose of this paper, principles will be understood as “normative standards at the porous borderlines between morals and law, between universalistic morals and situated ethics, which gain their validity in moral and ethical discourses in which we take various levels of situated givens ... into account”. Reliance on principles is supposed to enable us to reflect upon our chosen real-life subject, without either committing the mistake of model-thinking, or of taking circumstances as absolute givens which would allegedly render all normative considerations superfluous. This is a reflective strategy, in which circumstances are taken into account and explored against the background of universally acceptable values.