The Impact of the Western Tradition
The discussions and the examples presented in this chapter lead to the conclusion that, in the experience of the Venice Commission, the traditions and principles of Western European constitutionalism have had a primary, if not exclusive, relevance even in the creation of the constitutional orders of the new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe.
Two historical factors displayed special influence and oriented the work of scholars.On the one side, the political and constitutional history of the Central and Eastern countries signalled the presence of long-standing authoritarian and dictatorial regimes that blocked the maturation of a modern constitutionalism in those countries.[112] The experiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prevented even Hungary and Poland - countries that proudly claimed interesting epiphanies of primitive constitutionalism - from being in step with the Western European countries. In addition, in the twentieth century, some of these Western countries had experienced dictatorships, such as Italy and Germany. However, the authoritarian heritages in Italy and Germany were successfully cancelled at the end of the Second World War. New constitutions were adopted, and these have had an important influence on the following European constitutionalism developments. Moreover, legal and political actors had to take into account that the new Western European constitutionalism found promising cradles in the experiences of the UK's rule of law, the French Revolution’s Enlightenment and the spreading of constitutional monarchies across Europe in the nineteenth century. In fact, all of these past and new developments are extremely important for our analysis, as they are strictly connected with the second historical factor we are looking for.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Western liberal democracies advanced the progression towards a modern constitutionalism through the creation of supranational institutions.
The Council of Europe and the European Union, whose purposes and values have drawn inspiration from the constitutional experiences of their founding states, deserve special attention. Therefore, when the new democracies looked for international recognition of the abandonment of their dictatorial or authoritarian past, they requested to join the Council of Europe and - subsequently - the European Union. On those occasions, they accepted the sharing of the principles and values of Western constitutionalism. This choice was monitored by competent bodies of the two interested supranational institutions, which elaborated all the materials offered by the national Western traditions and the international efforts aimed at the consolidation of the constitutional values and principles. The results of these activities produced - in a transnational frame - the concretisation of the parameters of the European constitutional heritage, which resulted in the advent of the international constitutional law that is studied in the following pages.