During the Communist period, such an arrangement might have seemed a harmless sop to nationalistic sentiments, especially in the Slovak lands (Slovaks being outnumbered by Czechs on the order of something like two to one). After all, whatever the formal parliamentary structure, real power lay in the hands of the Party; the Federal Assembly was but a facade. After the Velvet Revolution, however, the Slovak members of the House of Nations found themselves holding what amounted to the power to veto important legislation. In formal terms there might be two chambers, but in a real sense there were three houses -- the Chamber of People, a Chamber of Czechs, and a Chamber of Slovaks. The post-Communist era in Czechoslovakia brought harder times to the poorer Slovak regions than to the Czech lands. As political lines hardened, efforts to write a new constitution for the Czech and Slovak Federation foundered on the shoals of the de facto veto power exercised by Slovak opposition party members in the Chamber of Nations.2 Structure aside, politics and personalities in the new democracies have been a major factor shaping the course of constitutional drafting and development. Sometimes a constitution's provisions reflect the place an important political figure has in the mind of the country at the time of the constitution's adoption. The leader may be admired and respected, he or she may be feared or distrusted (opinions may, of course, be mixed); in either event, a personality may affect what goes into the constitution. For example, one can make no real sense of Poland's "Little Constitution" (adopted in 1992) without being aware of the dynamics of Polish politics, particularly the place of Lech Walesa. Solidarity, more a movement than a party, split into two factions after 1989. Walesa had his natural base in the "Gdansk" faction; intellectuals of the "Warsaw" faction began to look to the draft constitution as a means to prevent Walesa from dominating Parliament and the government.3 The "Little Constitution" contains exceptionally complicated provisions regarding the executive and legislative branches (including no fewer than five ways to form a government). Those arrangements must be understood as a political compromise struck between Walesa’s people and parliamentarians wary of his powers and policies.4 In Czechoslovakia, the aspirations of political leaders played a key role in the divorce between the Czech and Slovak republics. Politicians and drafters working on a new constitution found the most difficult problem to be the question of how authority should be divided between the federal government and the governments of the two republics. As politicians struggled with this issue, public opinions polls consistently showed that a majority of the population in both the Czech and Slovak republics wanted to remain in a common state. At the political level, however, the struggle was as much over power as over a constitutional document. Slovak leaders in the Federal Assembly created deadlock to such degree that, whatever ordinary citizens may have wished, dissolution of the federation was the result. Politics, personalities, and structure often take forms distinctive to a particular country. There are, at the same time, historical circumstances and other factors that affect the making of constitutions in Central and Eastern Europe. A common legacy of all of the nascent democracies in the region is, of course, their having been part of the Soviet sphere after World War II. They were denied, therefore, the formative experience of democratic institutions and constitutionalism that their more fortunate neighbours to the west enjoyed. Czechoslovakia had a viable democracy between the two world wars, but that brief experiment ended over fifty years ago. Some countries in Central and Eastern Europe had never had a full-blown democratic experience. Whatever their fortunes before World War II, the counties of the region were deprived, for half a century after that war, of the opportunities to develop the political practices and the CSCE ODIHR BULLETIN Vol. 2, No. 1 4