Category: Andrew Arato
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Arato: Egypt Again
“Judge Helped Egypt’s Military to Cement Power” NY Times, July 3, by David Kirkpatrick is a very important report. While it has been possible to follow the scenario in Egypt in the available literature (especially an essay by Tamir Moustafa and in reports by the Crisis Group), this is the first time that an important…
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Arato on Hungary: Don’t Call it a Dictatorship
[note: cross-posted from booksandideas.net] It may seem like a scholastic question: is the current Hungarian regime a dictatorship (or an autocracy) in light of the changes made by the Constitution of 2012, the so-called Basic Law? Does answering this question make a difference for those seeking to reverse or replace the regime?
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New Hungary Constitution: New Opinions
Our contributor Andrew Arato, along with other leading academics, submitted an amicus brief to the Venice Commission concerning the new Constitution of Hungary. It is in many ways a devastating critique of the new document on both substantive and procedural grounds.
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Arato: Orban’s (Counter) Revolution of the Voting Booth and How it was Made Possible
During the age of great revolutions, Joseph de Maistre distinguished between counter revolutions and the contraries of revolutions. Fearing, rightly, that counter revolutions may have the same horrible consequences as the Jacobinism that he witnessed, he expressed his preference for the contrary of revolutions, but never really explained how it would work.
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Arato on Constitution Making in Hungary and the 4/5 Rule
The worst thing about the current constitution making process in Hungary led by the FIDESZ government is the process itself: under an opposition boycott, and involving an absurd process of popular consultation through sketchy and deficient mail in citizen questionnaires, it lacks all genuine aspects of participation and inclusion.
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Arato on The Return of Revolutions
We certainly said good-bye to revolutions too soon, between 1989 and 1995. Yes, we were right Romania was the exception, and the series of changes of regime certainly did not represent revolutions. Yet the fact that the latter were represented finally and definitively by the journalistic cliche as the „Revolutions of 1989” demonstrates the tremendous…