realisation of "the thousand year old national identity" of the "Croatian nation." The document proclaims Croatia to be "the national state of the Croatian nation and a state of members of other nations and minorities who are its citizens: Serbs, Moslems, Slovenes, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Hungarians, Jews, and others...." The Constitution goes on to guarantee such peoples "equality with citizens of Croatian nationality."18 This assurance of "equal footing" was intended, no doubt, to allay concerns of minorities about how they might be treated in post-Yugoslav Croatia. But any citizen who is not ethnically Croatian should find the Constitution’s basic premise unsettling. Defining the state in national or ethnic terms creates an atmosphere of "insiders" and "outsiders" -- a distinction between those who are the core of the state's being and those who are permitted, as a matter of sufferance, to live in that country. One who does not belong to the chosen ethnic community is not an individual like all others; he or she is, by definition, a member of a national minority. From Constitutions to Constitutionalism Having a written constitution does not guarantee that a country will enjoy the benefits of constitutionalism. Nearly every country, even the most repressive, has some document called a "constitution." The Soviet Union's 1936 Constitution glowed with promises of justice and human dignity, but it bore little relation to the realities of that Stalinist society. How does a country achieve constitutionalism? Some of the requisite conditions are external to the constitution and the institutions it creates. For example, a dedication to constitutional principles is not much help in the face of aggressive neighbours -- as the Bosnians, who sought to create a tolerant, multi-ethnic state, found to their sorrow. Internally, healthy polity depends in good measure on a stable economy. I remember, when I engaged a villager in the Philippines about that country's post-Marcos constitution, being asked, "But will it put food on my family's table?" Writing even the best of constitutions is but one step on the road to constitutionalism. Building a constitutional democracy requires developing such institutions as an independent judiciary, an independent bar, a free press and media, and competitive political parties. In a region where law and lawyers were for so long part of the problem, it will take time to create a legal culture in which courts are seen to do justice, rather than being mere functions of the party's will.19 Ultimately, no objective is more important than civic education -- the inculcation of civic virtues. A viable democracy requires that citizens understand that liberty is not license, that the open society depends on mutual tolerance, that rights have a universal quality. A people who do not understand the basic precepts of free government are unlikely to keep it alive and vibrant. Polish leaders understood this when, in 1773, they established a National Commission on Education -the first such body in Europe. Thomas Jefferson, whose 250th birthday we celebrated in 1993, also understood the connection between civic education and free government. Describing his 1777 Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, Jefferson called for "rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty."1 No democracy -- established or emerging -- can take liberty for granted. Witnessing the making of constitutions in the emerging democracies is an occasion for probing the nature and meaning of rights, the means of their enforcement, and the habits of mind that keep those rights alive. ENDNOTES CSCE ODIHR BULLETIN Vol. 2, No. 1 9