The Brief Life of Constitutional Government

Abstract

Pašić’s thumbprint was clearly visible on the Vidovdan Constitution, which was closely modelled on the Serbian constitution of 1903. Although the Constituent Assembly from time to time canvassed the merits of the French and American systems of government, and of an ‘English-style Parliament’, the constitution created a form of representative democracy which resembled none of them. The title of the new state, ‘The Constitutional, Parliamentary and Hereditary Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, seemed to hint at the ‘Westminster’ model of government, but Pašić had no such thing in mind. His was an intensely patriarchal vision of a political order rooted in the ties of blood and kinship between rulers and ruled, in which the key terms were not ‘state and citizen’, but ‘people and king’. The Crown was to occupy a constitutional position above the strife and turmoil of party squabbles, and bring about consensus rule. Article 55 described the King as an ‘inviolable person’, but the cabinet stood ‘immediately under the King’ (Article 90), who appointed and dismissed ministers, and wielded a real power of veto over legislation. In effect, the constitution established the dual sovereignty of the Peoples’ Assembly and the Crown, yet the King could not be called to account for his political acts.¹