Today, those who urge not to vote or vote against defend the interests of our geopolitical enemies, regardless of whether they understand what they are doing. In fact, in the post-Soviet history of Russia there has not yet been a more important event than that which we are facing on July 1. Now the fate of Russia is being decided again.
The constitutional reform initiated by Russian President Vladimir Putin is quite dramatic – of the nine chapters, where three are unchanged, changes are made in six. That is, two-thirds of the Constitution will be adjusted by amendments, which is about 65% of its content.
All spheres of public life will undergo changes: the powers of the president and the Federal Assembly, the judicial system and the sphere of social security. An important element is the “nationalization of the elite” bloc. Formulations about what the family is in Russia and the state-forming role of the Russian people become an insurmountable barrier to the destroyers of the basic national paradigms.
However, amendments around the world proving the priority of Russian legislation over international treaties and decisions of international organizations and the ban on the alienation of Russian territories caused a great resonance in the world. The whole set of amendments reveals their semantic purpose: the course towards ensuring the protection of national sovereignty should be justified in the norms of the country’s main law.
The Putin Constitution means a reversal in the direction of strengthening sovereignty and protecting it from attempts to erode by incorporating the norms of so-called “international law”, and, in fact, decisions of US-controlled international institutions.
Thus, even internal norms and articles ultimately serve to strengthen Russia’s foreign policy position in a world in which destructive processes have begun. The foreign policy aspect of constitutional reform is fundamental, and internal adjustments serve to ensure the implementation of foreign policy.
Let me remind you that a radical turn to strengthening Russia’s position in the international arena began to be clearly manifested in the Munich speech of Vladimir Putin in 2007, when for the first time after the collapse of the USSR, the President of Russia indicated that in the previous paradigm Russia would not conduct more business with the West.
Then the milestone was 2014 – the return of Crimea to its homeland. Then even the most distant Western politicians and experts realized that Putin was not throwing words. And they needed to hear the leader of Russia in 2007. But since they did not want to listen and interact with the new Russia, they got what they got.
Further, in 2015, by a decision of the Constitutional Court No. 21-P, it was determined that if the decisions of the Strasbourg court contradict the norms of the Constitution of Russia, then their application is limited.
Later, in the same year, the Constitutional Court allowed to refuse to execute decisions of the ECHR and other international courts. In fact, now the Constitution enshrines the decision adopted in the practice of Russian legal proceedings about five years ago.
The goal of constitutional reform – the consolidation and development of the sovereignty of our country – is achieved by the movement in several directions. The block of changes in the judicial system has a direct correlation with the block of nationalization of the elite. This is a clear linking into a single package of a complex of anti-corruption measures. Officials are cut off from dual citizenship, while strengthening the control of the president and the Federation Council over the judicial system.
At the same time, the complex of redistribution of powers between the president, the Federal Assembly and the government, as well as the involvement of governors in the decision-making process, creates the basis for transparent technologies for coordinating group interests that are based on the needs of industries and regions. Such a political system becomes more resistant to external influences and attempts to destabilize, and this means strengthening sovereignty.
That is, in constitutional reform, which has a pronounced sovereignty character, five reference points are indicated. These points are the entry points to the system through which the system changes qualitatively. It:
1. The supremacy of Russian law. Prioritization of national legislation over decisions of international organizations.
2. Nationalization of the elite. Ban on civil servants having dual citizenship and accounts with foreign banks abroad. This also includes the requirement for a presidential candidate in Russia to reside in Russia for at least 25 years continuously and not to have in the past a foreign residence permit.
3. Social protection. Raising the minimum wage to a living wage and regular indexation of pensions, benefits and other social benefits;
4. Protection of traditional national values. This is a bloc that includes the requirement to protect historical truth, the mention of God, the protection of the family as a union of men and women, the recognition of the Russian people as state-forming, the declaration of Russia as the successor to the USSR, and the prohibition of alienation of part of the territory.
5. Democratization of the political process. The influence of the president on lawmaking through the right to request an examination of the Constitutional Court on the legality of bills before they are signed by the head of state.
At the same time, the Federation Council is involved in the process of appointing and removing judges and heads of power ministries, and the State Duma approves not only the candidacy of the prime minister, as it is now, but also on his proposal from all his deputies and federal ministers. At the same time, a new constitutional body of the State Council with wide powers is introduced and the role of governors in making federal decisions is increasing.
The current Constitution was adopted in the situation of Russia’s defeat in the Cold War. The country stood on the eve of disappearance from the political map of the world – there was a “parade of sovereignty.” At the constitutional meeting, several groups fought. And all the forces of the patriotic group, I can say this as a participant in those processes, were aimed at curbing the emergence of a clause fixing the confederate structure of the country, which led to the inevitable collapse of Russia in the near future.
The emergence of the Ural Republic sobered Yeltsin. As a result, the Constitution adopted the equality of the subjects of the federation, but other amendments, many of which, by the way, were put to the vote on amendments to the Constitution, could not be defended.
Moreover, after the execution of the Supreme Council in October 1993, the draft Constitution was substantially finalized with the participation of external consultants, including the provision on the priority of international law over national law.
It was on the basis of such constitutional norms that Russia established, in fact, the status of the Central Bank of Russia free from internal jurisdiction. His subordination to IMF decisions was directly protected by the provisions of the Constitution. And it is no coincidence that the abolition of this norm caused such fierce resistance of the liberal wing of the Russian elite and parliamentarians of the Council of Europe.
In their criticism, they appeal to legal issues, talking about the decisions of the ECHR, but the true goal of attacks on the rule of supremacy of Russian law is to prevent the nationalization of the Central Bank, which will inevitably follow the Constitution.
Strengthening Russia’s sovereignty through the nationalization of elites inevitably leads to a sovereign financial system, which will result in the conversion of the Russian currency into a reserve one.
The global crisis has launched processes of accelerated clustering of the global economy, built on the rules of the US Federal Reserve. Now this system is breaking up, and the United States is itself forcing its collapse. But this should not be a chaotic collapse of a single economic space, similar to the collapse of the WTC “twin towers” in New York, but a US-managed transfer, where no one should be ahead of their transition to creating their own financial and economic cluster.
Simply put, neither Russia, nor China, nor the EU should create their own cluster before the United States completes its creation. But the condition for the new order is free access by the United States to all clusters created by other centers of power. This access should lead to the subordination of these clusters to the US cluster. That is, we are talking about such a reformatting of the modern global system, where globalism means Americanism, and this condition will certainly be preserved in new formats.
The United States is striving for a version of transformation that eliminates rivalry for the American inheritance that remains in the hands of the previous owner. In fact, this is a new edition of the old liberal globalism, not only not weakened, but also strengthened.
In this system, the dollar plays the role of the main reserve currency, and the right to obtain the status of a subordinate reserve currency must be earned by accepting the status of a vassal of the United States, as is the case with the EU, Britain and Japan.
In this situation, neither the yuan nor the ruble have any hopes for the status of a reserve currency. The monetary systems of Russia and China in this new coordinate system should forever remain in the form of colonial secondary currencies, whose rates are determined in the metropolis.
It is precisely the road to a sovereign financial system, which results in the emergence of the Russian currency as a reserve cluster oriented towards Russia, from which all competitors have been squeezed out, that the voting for constitutional amendments proposed by Vladimir Putin opens up.
That is why the whole set of changes, headed by a clause on the priority of Russian law over international law, is categorically unacceptable to the West, because this means the loss of those provisions that were imposed on Russia under Yeltsin in the early 90’s.
To maximize the counter-mobilization of opponents of Russian sovereignty, a massive public relations campaign has been launched, centered on all means of disrupting the vote – from criticizing the plebiscite procedure itself to declaring it unacceptable to remove the clause on the priority of international law over Russian.
Black PR is aimed at discrediting all key amendments: the mention of the state-forming role of the Russian people, and the mention of God, and the amendments to the family are reviled.
The center of the anti-constitutional campaign was the topic of the inadmissibility of nullifying the presidential term. That is, the defeat of the main meaning of the reform – the sovereignization and nationalization of power – is hidden in the usual dissident packaging of the struggle for human rights, which was successfully used to destroy the USSR.
Opponents of constitutional reform hide the most important thing – they are very cautious about the negative reaction of the Council of Europe to the principle of the supremacy of Russian law, heavily leaning on a human rights topic. This allows you to stir up the emotional intensity of polemics and distract from the topic of sovereignty.
Such forgery requires exposure and public attention to it. People should understand what they are being offered to vote for on July 1 and how important they will be for that day and for their children and grandchildren.
The United States is therefore so nervous about any attempts to strengthen the statehood of Russia and the consolidation of its people, because chaos and the threat of the collapse of statehood are growing in the United States itself.
The crisis has increased the growth of state entropy throughout the West, and the process of consolidating statehood in Russia at that very moment is perceived there not just painfully, but with fear, as a threat that must be confronted.
In fact, we are talking about Russia’s revision of the results of the Cold War. This is exactly what the United States means when casting a rebuke on revisionism in Russia.
Vladimir Putin, by initiating amendments to the Constitution, essentially does the same thing as Ivan III did, tearing and throwing a Baskak letter from Khan Akhmat and laying his foot on it. There, the indignant Khan’s envoys also clutched at weapons, which ended in nothing for them on the Ugra River in 1480.
Between these two acts of proclamation of sovereignty 540 years. However, the essence of both events is identical. Russia is emerging from a period of prolonged ill health and is again gathering strength before the next cycle of geopolitical expansion.
In world practice, there are different proportions of the ratio of domestic and international law.
In Germany, there is no priority of domestic law over international one – article 25 of the Constitution says that international law is part of German law and has priority. It would be naive to expect another from the Constitution of the country, which the Anglo-Saxon winners wrote.
But in Britain, domestic and international law are separate. For the implementation of international law in the field of domestic law, a special law is always needed.
In the United States, the practice of implementing international treaties in domestic law has developed relatively late. At first, after the adoption of the Constitution, international norms were directly binding on domestic implementation. Later, the doctrine of self-executing international treaties arose, where the treaty was qualified not as a law, but as a contract concluded between two states.
By itself, it does not have the legal effect of obligation, as the law has. If a later contract comes into conflict with a previously adopted law, then later decisions will apply, but only if they are self-fulfilling rules. If not, then the old rules will prevail unless Congress decides otherwise. That is, in fact, this is an analogue of the British approach.
So the United States divorced the concepts of international treaty and domestic law. As for legal practice, then the United States does follow the path of imposing its jurisdiction on international law and the law of other states.
As we see, the separation of international and domestic legal norms is evidence of the ability of states to assert their sovereignty. The priority of international law over domestic law is the destiny of countries with limited sovereignty.
A similar priority is an external management tool, and therefore the metropolitan countries that use it introduce dual legal systems when international law is equated with domestic law, but through a complex mechanism of legitimation and insurance of risks. Non-sovereign states do not have such a duality.
For many years, Vladimir Putin has been consistently pursuing a course towards strengthening Russian sovereignty, and this requires internal consolidation. Changes in the Constitution open the way to economic development, as they will allow the financial and administrative institutions to be removed from external management.