Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law in the Process of Nation-State Building - The Case of Serbia

Twenty years after the introduction of the multiparty system and ten years after the democratic changes, Serbia is still one of the countries that are not democratically consolidated. Research on this interdisciplinary project will primarily be focused on the values of constitutionalism and the rule of law, because even though Serbia might be said to belong to the group of relatively stable ‘electoral democracies’, it is not yet a well-established constitutional democracy. An additional reason for this research endeavor lies exactly in the fact that Serbia, after a long period of time, has recently renewed its independent statehood and in the nation-state building process it is subjected both to general challenges of globalization, and to some more specific challenges, characteristic for the Western Balkans states. Concerning the comprehensiveness of the research project, it is envisaged that the project is divided into four sub-projects: 1. Political culture and democratic consolidation; 2. Legal, political and economic aspects of transition; 3. Sub-national, national and European identity/identities; 4. Constitutional judiciary and the rule of law. Taken together, these sub-projects constitute an integrated research enterprise that will not only try to critically assess the up to now process of the Serbian democratic transition, but also to provide plausible guidelines for the open problem of the further strengthening of constitutionalism and the rule of law in Serbia.