Identitate (constituțională) națională și iliberalism în Constituția din 1923
National (constitutional) identity and illiberalism in the Constitution of 1923

Summary/Abstract: This paper highlights and explains the contribution of the Romanian Constitution of 1923 to the building of the Romanian ethnocentric (national) constitutional identity and its decisive impact upon the constitutional and political developments along the Romanian 20th century. Grounded in the Romanian constitutional nationalism and xenophobia, this Constitution failed to accommodate the new international liberal standards regarding the protection of national minorities imposed by the system of the League of Nations after the WWI. The Romanian fathers of the Constitution not only refused to enshrine in the constitutional text the positive individual and collective rights recognized to the Romanian ethnic minorities by the Treaty of 19 December 1919, but built the 1923 Constitution as a constitutional cathedral of the Romanian ethnic majority where the ethnic minorities were tolerated as shadow citizens. On a short term, this illiberal ethos made quite easier the passage from the Romanian ethnocentric nationalism to the Romanian racial nationalism of the period 1938–1944. On a long term, the Constitution of 1923 represented a pattern of constitutional identity building strongly cherished by the fathers of the post-communist Constitution (1991). This is why the interwar Romanian illiberalism was widely preserved. On a general survey, neither the Constitution of 1923, nor the Constitution of 1991 succeeded to manage in a coherent liberal spirit the linkage between the national/ethnocultural identity and the constitutional identity in the multi-ethnic Romania.

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