The Impossible Parliamentary Government: Cabinet Formation and Dismissal in Interwar Romania
The Impossible Parliamentary Government: Cabinet Formation and Dismissal in Interwar Romania

Summary/Abstract: We talk nowadays increasingly more about the “democratic traditions of the Romanian people”. Who knows these traditions? Even a quick foray into the Romanian institutional history shows that they do not exist. The interwar period was neither a golden age of the Romanian democracy, nor its inferno. Romania never reached a real parliamentary or representative government but it largely kept up its appearances. In terms of political democracy, Romania's situation was worse than today, but not the worst in those circumstances. That is what we try to prove here, reviewing the Romanian constitutional texts as well as the Romanian political practices. Our motto is: “A knowledge of these things guards as, at any rate, from the illusion, for illusion it must be termed, that modern constitutional freedom has been established by an astounding method of retrogressive progress” (Dicey, 1889: 17).

• Details
• Contents