Reconstituting Paradise Lost: Temporality, Civility, and Ethnicity in Post-Communist Constitution-Making

This article focuses on constitutional developments and legal policies in Central Europe since 1989 and elaborates on their temporal analysis with special emphasis on the distinction between demos and ethnos in the political and legal discourse. Using various social theories of time, identity, and codification of social traditions, I argue that the difference between civility and ethnicity does not involve simply a conflict between liberal democratic aspirations and ethno-nationalist myths of authoritarian politics, but rather represents two distinct traditions manipulated by political agents and codified in the process of recent constitution-making. The process of selecting different traditions and political manipulations of the past is reflected at the level of both constitutional symbolism and specific governmental policies in post-Communist Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The final part of the text analyzes relations between the abstract symbolic language of constitutional documents and concrete, "ethnos-" based legal policies implemented in these countries of Central Europe.