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Dipartimento Di Scienze Politiche Cattedra Comparative Constitutional Law

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Dipartimento Di Scienze Politiche Cattedra Comparative Constitutional Law Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche Cattedra Comparative Constitutional Law The Constitutional Process in Three Former Yugoslavian Countries Relatore Prof. Giovanni Rizzoni Candidato Jacopo Pizzi Matr. 620842 Correlatore Prof. Guido Meloni Anno Accademico 2013-2014 Summary Introduction ............................................................................................................... 4 Chapter one ............................................................................................................... 8 The heritage from the past ......................................................................................... 8 1. Historical, cultural and political heritage ............................................................................................... 8 a) The heritage of the period before the unification ............................................................................ 8 b) The interwar period ......................................................................................................................... 11 c) Emigration policies and nation building in the interwar period ...................................................... 17 d) The Second World War; three wars in one ..................................................................................... 21 e) The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ................................................................................... 22 2. The Juridical Heritage .............................................................................................................................. 24 Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................. 32 The New Constitutions ............................................................................................. 32 1. Elements in common ........................................................................................................................... 32 2. The Political System: the Constituent Assemblies and the first multiparty elections ......................... 40 3. The new Constitutions: form of government ...................................................................................... 46 a) Slovenia ........................................................................................................................................... 46 b) Croatia ............................................................................................................................................. 50 c) Serbia ............................................................................................................................................... 55 4. Yugoslavia: federation or confederation? ........................................................................................... 59 5. Conclusions .......................................................................................................................................... 64 Chapter 3 ................................................................................................................. 65 The consolidation of the new institutions ................................................................ 65 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 65 2. Ethnic conflicts ..................................................................................................................................... 66 3. The party system: coalitions, electoral laws and competition. ........................................................... 69 a) The electoral laws ............................................................................................................................ 69 b) Party system and electoral competition ......................................................................................... 74 4. The Constitutional reforms .................................................................................................................. 80 a) The Constitutional amendments in Slovenia ................................................................................... 80 b) Croatia: from a semi-presidential system to a parliamentary system ............................................ 82 2 c) The death of the “Third” Yugoslavia ................................................................................................ 87 5. Conclusions .......................................................................................................................................... 91 Chapter four ............................................................................................................. 92 Minority rights and European conditionality ............................................................ 92 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 92 2. The European conditionality ............................................................................................................... 95 a) The European conditionality in the EU enlargement ...................................................................... 95 b) The conditionality of the Council of Europe and the OSCE ............................................................. 97 c) The European conditionality in former Yugoslavia ......................................................................... 98 3. The protection of minorities in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia ............................................................ 100 a) The ethnic composition of the three countries ............................................................................. 100 b) The minority rights in the Constitutions ........................................................................................ 101 c) Linguistic and cultural rights .......................................................................................................... 105 d) Rights of representation ................................................................................................................ 107 4. Issues on protection of minorities in specific states ..................................................................... 114 a) The Erased ..................................................................................................................................... 114 b) The protection of the Italian minority living in Croatia in the bilateral treaty of 1996 ..................... 116 5. European conditionality and protection of minority rights .............................................................. 117 6. Conclusions ........................................................................................................................................ 120 Conclusions ............................................................................................................ 121 Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 127 3 Introduction The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 has been followed by the dismemberment of some of the eastern European countries such as Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. From the ashes of those countries, new entities were born. These new countries, at the beginning of the 1990s, had to walk through a long transition, in order not only to gain and maintain the independence, in some cases with the force too, but also to establish new democratic and free market institutions. My thesis will focus on the constitutional process in former Yugoslavian countries. Here the split of the older Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in new sovereign states presents some particular features: first of all, the disintegration process was carried out in a bloody way, with hundreds of thousands deaths and many refugees. Secondly, while former Soviet Union countries and international community accepted that Russia succeeded to USSR in international treaties, and so to take Soviet Union permanent seat in the Security Council, this didn’t happened to the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The claim of FRY to succeed to SFRY in the international relations was rejected not only by the other former Yugoslavian countries, but also by the UN, forcing the new state to apply for admission under Article 4 . The reasons for this rejection were the lack of some element in the government organization which characterized SFRY, namely the qualification of “socialist” republic, and the fact that, in SFRY, the presidency used to be covered in turn by representatives of the different republic which composed the federation.1 With the declaration of independence of Slovenia and Croatia of 25 June 1991, the disintegration process began. As I said, this process in Yugoslavia was a violent process; immediately after the declaration, Yugoslav People’s Army moved to Slovenian border with Italy, while in Croatia a conflict broke out between the government, and Serb rebels backed by the Yugoslav army. The two countries became independent from Yugoslavia in the October of the same year, after the failure in the efforts to transform the federation into a confederation. An important role in the break up process was made by the Arbitration Commission of the Conference of Yugoslavia, commonly known as Badinter Arbitration Committee, and its advisory opinions. In the
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