TRANSITION TO RULE OF LAW: On the Democratic Transformation in Hungary (original) (raw)

After the methodologically well-founded and scholarly well-developed legal scholarship broke down on the European Continent in the early midcentury-for it was unprepared to face, and unable to give any fairly justifiable response to, the challenge of the temptations the rise of new authoritarianisms and totalitarianisms (sprung up, first, from the attempts at implementing the tempting idea of Bolshevism and, later on, captivating parts of the world by the threats of Fascism and National Socialism) had offered-theoretical renewal followed all over the world, especially in Europe. This was the age of the rebirth of natural law, in the place of (rather than supplementing) the lawyer's traditional world concept, that is, legal positivism, rooted in the very foundation of the cultures of both Civil Law and Common Law. Nevertheless, when the predominantly moral shock of World War II was over, the pressure of reconsideration became soon shadowed. Starting by the late '50s, however, a growing interest has arisen to substitute former patterns of methodology to historico-comparative investigation, sociological inquiry, anthropological foundation, as well as logico-linguistic analysis. Innovative trends of thought in legal theory have led to the foundation of a series of new disciplines and contributed to a genuine theoretical renewal. In the final account, it was a breakthrough and a success. Nowadays, nevertheless, one can only encounter a growing dissatisfaction, accompanied by the well-felt need for reorientation. The causes, as well as its context are largely a function of underlying domestic conditions, namely, socio-historical settings, political biases, intellectual traditions, and the store of instruments (ideologies, institutions, skills and techniques) the arrangement in question has ever developed for both serving everyday routine and coping with new expectations. As to Hungary and the whole region in Central and Eastern Europe, one of the main characteristics of the imposed regime of 'actually existing Originally drafted in 1989 for the 'Preface' to the proceedings of the Finnish-Hungarian Symposium of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Finnish and Hungarian Papers on Legal Theory, which was then thought to be co-edited with Aulis Aarnio as a Beiheft of Rechtstheorie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot). * Revised version of the intervention at the conference held near to Prague at Stirin in December 1991 on "The Vitality of Central and Eastern Europe after the Eclipse", organized by the Institute for European and International Studies, Luxembourg. 1 Cf. Csaba Varga Jogi elméletek jogi kultúrák Kritikák, ismertetések a jogfilozófia és az összehasonlító jog köréből (Theories and cultures of law: surveys and reviews in legal philosophy and comparative law) (Budapest: Loránd Eötvös University Faculty of Law Project on Comparative Legal Cultures 1994), pp. 269 and 297 (Jogfilozófiák].