ELEMENTS OF ROMANIAN CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY
ELEMENTS OF ROMANIAN CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY

Summary/Abstract: Romania’s constitutional history hardly gathers two centuries; along them, many of our fundamental papers were mostly imported ones, than national original creations. At the beginning of the modern era, we received the frameworks of the constitutional life from the phanariots, Russians, and later from the European powers interested in setting the Principalities at the mouth of Danube. In 1866, we succeeded to strengthen a unification which was hardly accepted by the European powers and we adopted a constitution which translated into Romanian the text of the Kingdom of Belgium’s fundamental law. Then, after The Great Unification from 1918, we made the first Romanian constitutional text, pursuant to the highest democratic standards of that time. Unfortunately, we abandoned it in 1938, by Carol the IInd’s coup d'état. Reinforced after the war, the 1923’s Constitution was quickly replaced by the first Soviet-type constitution, in 1948. Two other communist constitutions followed: in 1952 and 1965; both of them set up orders of the single party and of the socialist property, with social extensions towards dictatorship and the cult of personality. After the anti-communist Revolution from 1989, Romania came again on the trajectory of the pluralist constitutional democracy. 1991’s Constitution and its amendments from 2003 settled us within the European and Euro-Atlantic frameworks. Enough ambiguities still persist in our fundamental law, creating the environment of an inefficient operation of the state owned institutions, as well as a certain citizen’s distrust in democracy.

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