Theory and practice of dissolution of parliament: a comparative study with special reference to the United Kingdom and Greek experiencee
- Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1972
- 283 p.
This book makes an unusual and valuable contribution to comparative studies, and it is not easy to give an adequate account of it in a foreword. Basically the author offers to provide in Parts II and III a historical survey of the United Kingdom and Greek experience in the matter of the dissolution of Parliament over the period of the past hundred years or so, and more particularly during the twentieth century. And simply as a historical survey the book has considerable merit. In the Greek part (Part III) Dr Markesinis makes available unpublished material from some of the protagonists in the more recent crises and also provides for the first time a lawyer's interpretation as well as a new insight into events more canvassed by historians, such as the two dissolutions of 1915. Principally however, he gives a coherent, informed and most commendably dis passionate account of the actual operation in Greece of a political institution - the power of dissolution - which has been the storm-centre of the troubled course of Greek affairs. Because of the involutions of the story and because of the condensation which has been necessary, the narrative requires to be read with close attention; but it is rewarding and it has the additional topical interest of putting the present Greek situation into a proper perspective. The United Kingdom scene (Part II) is necessarily more familiar to an English reader, though I doubt that the book will have English readers only. But even the English constitutional lawyer will gain advantage from the new matter which Dr Markesinis has found in unpublished Cabinet and other papers, and from his Chapter 7 on 'Dissolution today', where the opposing views are discussed with modesty and discrimination, and not without an element of originality. The foreign reader will greatly benefit from the lucid survey of the English precedents, and it may be specially recommended to politicians, Greek and others, who are apt to quote and to misquote those precedents.