Central and Eastern Europe as a Double Periphery?

Of course, not all the topics were indeed discussed in detail and even in case of those discussed, the final word has definitely not yet been spoken. Nevertheless, the topics offered a food for thought and incited long-lasting debates both during the conference as well as within the unofficial parts of the program.

As in the previous CEE Forum meetings, the target audience was the community of young theorists either working in CEE or studying topics with CEE dimensions, including young academics affiliated to the universities or research institutes outside the CEE region, with Central or Eastern European research interests. The selection of chapters offered by the organizers in this volume thus provides an up-to-date view of the CEE region and issues and problems shared by the CEE countries, 30 years after the 1989 changes. The views and perspectives offered thereby include both those of insiders as well as those from outside the CEE region – whereby even those from the outside clearly have an important message to convey for the current situation in CEE.

About the contributions

A number of arguments suggested by Rafał Mańko are echoed in other chapters within this volume, his chapter hence providing uniting leitmotivs for the whole volume. For example, concerning legal transfers, Boldizsár Szentgáli-Tóth’s chapter proves that the CEE region is strongly influenced by legal borrowings – he shows this on the example of ‘qualified laws’, being close to Western organic laws and to ‘laws with constitutional force’. The author thereby reconsiders the role and importance of this type of legislation during the transition period after 1989, claiming to having identified their task in guaranteeing the protection of fundamental rights in this region. Still, he also points to the fact that the evolution in individual CEE countries was not uniform, and each country has undergone specific development with regard to this type of legislation.

Similarly, Marin Keršić in his chapter explains the ‘migration’ of the idea of proportionality and balancing of principles as suggested by Robert Alexy, from Germany into the case law of Croatian Constitutional Court. The author is doing that on the analysis on selected cases where the Constitutional Court of Croatia explained the ideas of proportionality and balancing, based also on Article 16 of the Croatian Constitution, being a so-called balancing regulating norm.

The following section of the book dwells on an underlying idea of relationship between freedom and unfreedom in the CEE region. First of all, Enrico Arona reconsiders the idea of political freedom in analytical terms of freedom, unfreedom and not-freedom, claiming that there is a middle category, tertium datur, between the two extremes, himself being thus a representative of a trivalent theory of freedom – maybe reflecting the experience of the CEE region in political terms of yesterday and of tomorrow.