The Quick Move towards the Presidential Republic in Eleven of the Very Different Countries of the Ex-Soviet Union

Abstract

Probably the views which accounted for the choice of the presidential republic were never as varied, contrasted even, as when 11 of the 15 ‘units’ which formerly composed the Soviet Union decided to opt for that form of government on or soon after becoming ‘independent’ in the early 1990s . The fact that the move was unanimous among these 11 countries strongly suggests that the presidential republic had become the arrangement par excellence across a wide spectrum of key political decision-makers of the late twentieth century world; the matter was analysed in an article of mine published in the Japanese Journal of Political Science in 2012. ¹ Communism had once been ‘the wave of the future’: it then spectacularly failed, at any rate in Europe, indeed elsewhere as well, given what its political arrangements really were. The presidential republic thus came to fill what had become an empty space. The ‘model’ of the presidential republic did more, however: it positively proposed a formula which, on the one hand, established a fundamental relationship between the top of the political pyramid and the people, but which, on the other hand, accommodated very different approaches to the nature of what that relationship could be in practice.