УСТАВ БЕЗ ПРОЦЕДУРЕ ИЛИ ПРОЦЕДУРА БЕЗ УСТАВА: ЈЕДНА ИСТОРИЈСКА ПАРАЛЕЛА
THE CONSTITUTION WITHOUT A PROCEDURE OR A PROCEDURE WITHOUT THE CONSTITUTION: A HISTORICAL PARALLEL

Summary/Abstract: Raising the issue of the constitution in the Republic of Serbia today, and the long-standing delay in solving this issue, has many similarities with opening the constitution issue in the Principality and the Kingdom of Serbia from 1880-1882. In this article, the author draws a parallel between the two periods, emphasizing that in either case there was a very complicated prescribed procedure for adopting the new constitution, which was frequently used as an excuse for disagreement 011 the contents of the new constitutions. Then and now, from the moment of opening the constitution issue it took Serbia ten years to reach the final solution, the only difference being that up-today the new . constitution of the Republic of Serbia has not been adopted yet. Apart from the analogy related to the delay in adopting the new constitutions, the author points to a series of other similarities. Getting down to the core of the constitution issue, the author emphasizes that the basic problem in solving this issue rests in the fact that, both then and now, the state institutions fell under the influence of political relations which made it impossible for the respective states to resolve the constitution issue; instead, they first fell into political crises and then into constitutional crises. Only when the state institutions do manage to get away from the impact of political relations will it be possible to dispense with the complicated constitutional procedure and eventually come to the solution of the constitution issue by reaching a constitutional compromise of different political factors. Thus, in the 1888, Serbia ended the constitutional crisis by seriously approaching the formation and the composition of the Constituent Committee and drafting the new constitution, which is far from the situation in Serbia today. As a result of the newly discovered way of changing'the constitution (by reaching a compromise between the Radical Party and King Milan), in 1888 Serbia obtained the most democratic constitution ever in its history of an independent state.

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