Page 73 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes • A bill passed by the Congress requires the assent of the President and the Courts may invalidate
it if they find that the impugned law is against the constitution or the due process of law.
• The emergence of communism in Russia, Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany can be
cited as the concrete instances in this regard. The new constitutional devices adopted in these
countries contained two elements that distinguished them from a constitutional state hitherto
known—political dictatorship through the dominance of a single party to the exclusion of all
others and a totalitarian system that used the political machine to control and direct every
aspect of economic, social and even religious life.
• The provisions of the constitution not only provide for the composition of various organs of
the government and the powers entrustedto them, they also attach sanctity to the norms of
liberty, equality, justice, rights, etc.
• According to this view, the constitution is not only an end that ought to be respected by all,
it is also a means to an end, the being the achievement of security and the protection of
liberty of the people. The western concept of constitutionalism stands for a constitution that
is either in the form of a document, or it is like an assemblage of numerous laws, institutions
and customs. Whether the constitution is in the form of a document made at a particular time
of history as the American constitution was made by the “Philadelphia Convention in 1787,
or it is in the form of numerous laws, institutions, and conventions as in the case of the
English constitution, the western concept of constitutionalism lays emphasis on this point
that the basic laws of the land should be such that difference between the government of the
people and the constitution of the state is discernible.
• The problem of effectiveness “involves a factual situation and an evaluation and existential
judgment of that situation. If no one has ‘absolute’ power, if in actual fact there exists no
sovereign who holds unrestrained power in a given community, then the restraints may be
said to be effective.”
• The western or liberal concept of constitutionalism desires a ‘constitutional state’ that has a
well-acknowledged body of laws and conventions for the operation of a limited government.
It has a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary all required to work within the prescribed
framework by following the defined procedure.
• In a’socialist’ country, the constitution is not an end in itself, it is just a means to implement
the ideology of ‘scientific socialism’. It is a tool in the hands of the ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’ that seeks establish a classless society that would eventually turn into a stateless
condition of life.
• The real aim of the constitution in such a country is not to ensure liberty and equality, rights
and justice for all but to see that the enemies of socialism are destroyed and the new system
is firmly consolidated.
• As in the former Soviet Union so in the People’s Republic of China, the constitution is a sort
of mainfesto, a confession of faith, a statement of ideals that, as Wheare says, makes ‘excursions
into political theory’.
• As Lenin writes: “At each step in the most democratic bourgeois state, the oppressed masses
encounter a lamentable contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by capitalist
democracy and the thousands of factual limitations and complications making hired slaves
of the proletarians.”
• The Marxist concept of constitutionalism, thus, stood for the system of the Soviets wherein
“is realised the universal participation of the working people, one and all, inThe management
of the state.”
• The government undertakes several measures like compulsory conscription, military training,
nationalisation of major industries, censorship of the press, etc. for the sake of defending the
country. It appears that the framework of a constitutional government is subverted during war
times. Such a statement may and may not be correct depending upon the nature of the case.

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