DICTATORSHIP

Critically discuss whether judicial review operates as an effective safeguard against dictatorship



“Most democracies have developed a variety of safeguards against elective dictatorship.” (Brittan, 2009)

The Federal Republic of Germany adopted a constitution in 1949, called the Basic Law, which is based upon democracy, freedom and the rule of Law. Our Basic Law reflects the painful experience of the Nazi Regime and the lesson taught by the decline of the Weimar Republic. Germany overcame the most terrible dictatorship when it started to formulate a new democratic constitution.

Dictatorships, as those in Italy and Germany, became necessary as means of coercion to force upon the unwilling mass of small capitalists the new order and the regulating limitations. For this reason such dictatorship is often looked upon as the future political form of society of a developed capitalism the world over.

During forty years the socialist press pointed out that military monarchy was the political form of society belonging to a concentrated capitalistic society. For the bourgeois is in need of a Kaiser, the Junkers and the army in defense against a revolutionary working class on one side and the neighboring countries on the other side. For ten years the belief prevailed that the republic was the true form of government for a developed capitalism, because under this form of state the bourgeoisie were the masters. Now the dictatorship is considered to be the needed form of government. Whatever the form may be, the most fitting reasons for it are always found. While at the same time countries like England, France, America and Belgium with a highly concentrated and developed capitalism, retain the same form of parliamentary government, be it under a republic or kingdom.

Observing America, we find in this land of greatest concentration of monopolistic capital as little desire to change to a dictatorship as we find in England. Under the Roosevelt administration certain regulations and actions were effected in order to relieve the results of the depression, some were complete innovations. Among these there was also the beginning of a social policy, which was hitherto entirely absent from American politics.

It was the firm consensus of all political forces active in the constitutional assembly to prevent another failure of representative democracy in Germany and to establish effective safeguards against dictatorship and the disregard for human rights. The constitution should therefore be the paramount law of the land and claim priority over any government act. In order to reach this goal, the Basic Law contains the following important guarantees.

1. The basic principles of the constitution - such as democracy, the rule of law, the principle of the social state, federalism, respect of human dignity - may not be altered at all; not even by a constitutional amendment(Burbank, 2009). The aim was to prevent the enemies of democracy from overturning it using its own instruments - like the majority rule.

2. According to art, human dignity is the unalterable foundation of the constitutional order. The confession to the inviolability of human dignity and personality was and ...