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Hague J Rule Law (2018) 10:1-3
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40803-018-0072-7
The Special Issue of the Hague Journal on the Rule
of Law on the Crisis of Constitutional Democracy
in Central and Eastern Europe
Jernej Letnar Cernic' Matej Avbelj2
Published online: 5 April 2018
© T.M.C. Asser Press 2018
This Special Issue of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law derives from the debates
at the workshop on How to Resolve the Crisis of Constitutional Democracy in
Central and Eastern Europe? held at the Graduate School of Government and
European Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on 9 and 10 December 2016. The
workshop was organised under the auspices of the project on the Reform of the Rule
of Law and Democracy, generously funded by the Slovenian Research Agency [J5-
7359 (A)]. The contributions to the workshop examined the state of the
constitutional democracy and the rule of law in the Central and Eastern Europe.
In the constitutional democracy, all of the three elements of democracy: input
and output legitimacy and the political process through which they are connected,
have to take place within the framework of the rule of law. Simultaneously, there
can be no rule of law if the laws by which the individuals are ruled do not come into
being in a democratic manner. Democracy and the rule of law thus presuppose each
other, but at the same time their relationship is not entirely symbiotic. There is a
dormant democratic threat that the democratic majority will trump the rights of the
outvoted minorities. This is what the rule of law is there for to prevent. This
counter-majoritarian problem, as it came to be known, is, however, only a seeming
one. If democracy is not understood as a simple rule by the majority, but rather as a
system of the organization of political power whose central value is the protection
of equal human dignity, then the constitutional self-limitation of the democratic
majority is not democracy's denial, but its vindication. Against this theoretical
® Jernej Letnar Cerni6
jernej .letnar@fds.si
® Matej Avbelj
matej.avbelj @fds.si
Graduate School of Government and European Studies, Ljubljana, Kranj, Slovenia
2 Associate Professor of European Law, Graduate School of Government and European Studies,
Nova Univerza in Slovenia, Predoslje 39, 4000 Kranj, Slovenia
I Springer ASSER PRES;](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/hagjuote10&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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