Constitutional Design: Image of State and Age

2 3U  D  Cence of their legal doctrines and existing constitutions. For example, American constitution designers played a signifi cant role in the mode-ling of the supreme laws of Japan (where their pressure was the big-gest), Germany and Italy [24]. Soviet legalists openly infl uenced on the development of constitutions by the states that over the next four dec-ades were part of the People’s Democracies bloc [5; 8; 13; 15]: Yugosla-via (1946 Constitution), Czechoslovakia (1948 Constitution), Romania (1947 and 1952 Constitutions), Poland (1947 Minor (Lesser) Constitu-tion and 1952 Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic), Hungary and German Democratic Republic (1949 Constitutions).Most interesting for the analysis of the constitutional trends of this period are the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany and the Constitution of Japan —  the constitutional acts of two states that did not only loose World War I I (the history of mankind is a long chain of wars, in which some countries declared themselves victors, while oth-ers were seeking to minimize the cost of loss). Probably for the fi rst time in the human history the defeated states, beside their territorial losses, fi nancial costs and deprivation of political rights, were convict-ed of crimes against humanity, and their leaders appeared before an international tribunal. But even in such circumstances these countries, destroyed and humiliated, needed to develop a constitutional and le-gal framework of their future, and present the image of this future to the rest of the world.Japan made attempts to keep intact the 1889 Constitution of the Em-pire of Japan known as Meij i Constitution, but Major General Courtney Whitney and Lieutenant Colonel Milo Rowell, on behalf of the US Military Government, drafted and presented to the Japanese Parliament a new constitution, which was in many ways based on the doctrine of Ameri-can constitutionalism. The American version o...