Rising Powers

Institutions and Elites

Brazil, China, Russia, Turkey

Edited by

Nicolas Monceau and Daniel Bourmaud

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Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux

Université Bordeaux Montaigne

Domaine universitaire

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© Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, Pessac, 2018

Rising Powers

Institutions and Elites

Brazil, China, Russia, Turkey

Edited by

Nicolas Monceau and Daniel Bourmaud

Translation of

Moya Jones, Cecilia Barker and Elena Polunina

Collection Science politique

Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux

List of contributors

Jorge BARRIENTOS-PARRA: Professor of Constitutional Law, São Paulo State University (Brazil).

Daniel BOURMAUD: Professor of Political Science, Faculty of Law and Political Science, University of Bordeaux (France).

Alla CHIRIKOVA: Doctor of Sociology, Chief Researcher in the Institute of Sociology, The Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia).

Alexander DUKA: Assistant Professor, Department of Theory and Philosophy of Politics, Faculty of Political science, St. Petersburg State University (Russia).

Lizandra de FÁTIMA DONATO: Advocate at the São Paulo Bar (Brazil).

Wenhua JIA: Professor of Political Science, Institute of Public Private Partnership, China University of Political Science and Law (China).

Ayhan KAYA: Professor of Politics and Jean Monnet Chair of European Politics of Interculturalism, Director of the European Institute, Department of International Relations, Istanbul Bilgi University (Turkey).

Nicolas MONCEAU: Associate Professor of Political Science, Faculty of Law and Political Science, University of Bordeaux (France).

Ting YAN: Associate Professor of Political Science, School of Political Science and Public Administration, China University of Political Science and Law (China).

Foreword

Nicolas Monceau and Daniel Bourmaud

This publication originated in an international conference entitled “Emerging Countries and the Study of the State: What Changes?” held at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Bordeaux (France) on 28 and 29 November 2014. The diversity and the breadth of the papers given at this conference have helped to identify and highlight two main directions for the study of rising powers and the reconfiguration of the state. The organisation of this book is determined by these two themes: institutions and regimes, and elites.

Four rising powers are examined here (Brazil, China, Russia and Turkey) and various themes have been emphasized including the organisation of institutions, the nature and development of regimes, the political legitimacy of institutions for citizens, the different territorial levels for the organisation of power, ideological debates about the founding principles of regimes as well as the role and the place of elites, and also their ideologies and their transformations as well as the policies that they implement.

Part I

Rising Powers and Institutions

Presentation

Major Emerging Nations Seen from the Inside

Daniel Bourmaud

The social sciences have been occupied with analysing the new emerging powers for more than a quarter of a century. That title, which had so far been unfamiliar, established itself all the more easily as it did not conform to a well established conceptual rigour. Everyone put what he wanted into the category, emphasising such and such an indicator as defining a perimeter of emergence with highly variable outlines. From BRICS to PICCS and going by way of E7 (the list is not exhaustive), there is a whole range of classifications according to criteria left up to the discretion of authors and disciplines.1 The emergence of economists chiefly guided by the classic gauges (GDP, growth level) corresponds only to a limited degree with that of political scientists. For them such emergence goes back to the internal process of institutionalising the state and its extensions into the international sphere. Power balances are thus reshaped in a post-bipolar world. A new hierarchy of power is gradually being established which combines the unfamiliar logics of multipolarity and instability. All kinds of conferences and events have followed on from each other, and studies of the subject are increasing.2

In organizing a conference on this subject the CMRP (Centre Montesquieu de Recherches Politiques) of the University of Bordeaux wanted to promote consideration of it that was original in two ways. The first thing was to approach universities from the countries concerned: mainly these are the analyses which the reader will find in the following pages. The second was to give the researchers a free hand as it were in treating the issue of emergence not in relation to a predetermined hypothesis but to leave all at liberty to choose the approach which seemed most pertinent to them. These free considerations from within emerging powers are the subject of the seven contributions which follow. In turn Brazil (J. Barrientos-Parra and L. de Fátima Donato), Russia (A. Duka, A. Chirikova), Turkey (A. Kaya, N. Monceau), and China (W. Jia, T. Yan) are examined from distinctive but not exclusive perspectives. The fact that these contributors all come from within political science makes for an examination, by way of the specific challenges presented by each country, of emerging powers that avoids heterogenous juxtapositions and above all underlines the similarities and constants running through diverse states and countries.

Everywhere forms of power and domination, if not restructured, are at least scrutinised. The weight of tradition, weighing on representations and practices, sketches out a “path dependency” whose extension is being travelled by the large emergent countries. It is true that heritage bears witness to the singularity of particular pathways, and each makes use of its own historicity, but the common denominator in all is an authoritarian heritage that they have to acknowledge. Only Turkey forms the object of a specific analysis dedicated to its military past and to the present-day implications for power relations. Nicolas Monceau traces the bearing of the elite guards on Ottoman, and then Turkish, political life. Even if the army has avoided capturing power for itself despite repeated military “coups d’état”, it has nonetheless shaped the political scene, as much with regard to the actors (parties and elites) as to constitutional arrangements. The military institution identifies itself as the ultimate guarantor of republican order, crystallised around the issue of secularism. One better understands the reluctance of the army to play secondary roles, and the springs of the confrontation, culminating in the attempted coup d’état of July 2016, between it and the power which is now in the hands of the Islamist AKP party and Erdoğan its leader.

The militarisation of politics in Turkey echoes that which has marked political life in Brazil since the nineteenth century. The military coup d’état of 1889 which ended Emperor Pedro II’s period in power was just the first of a series which would reach its high point in 1964: for more than twenty years Brazil found itself under the heel of a military junta. This military sequence which came to an end in 1985 very much explains the form of the political regime established in the 1987 constitution. The lack of a historically rooted democratic tradition led to the adoption of a constitution which aimed at deploying a range of devices to compensate for the shortcomings of a political culture infused with memory of authority where the recent praetorian heritage melded with the older Caudillismo heritage from the colonial period.

Russia and China, for their part, share the same original ideological reference, that of Marxism-Leninism; progressively overhauled in Chinese colours under the direction of Chairman Mao Tse Tung. Each the page of triumphant communism, but in different ways. Russia opted for a second revolution, symbolised by the disappearance of the USSR and starting again with its old name, while China retained the supremacy of the Communist Party and opened up a new era inaugurated by Deng Xiao Ping and continued by his successors.

The fact that such reconfigurations were taking place everywhere prompts an examination of the causes of the process and its modalities. The first of these questions is not directly addressed by the contributors, leaving open the issue of explaining it by internal forces and external variables. It is apparent that the motor for change followed endogenous processes in which the exhaustion of forms of domination played a determining role. The assumption of power by the AKP in Turkey in 2002 was a response to “evident […] exhaustion in the security system”.3 As for the Brazilian military, they left the scene consensually, and not forced out by a coup. Their hegemony was never able truly to establish itself despite recourse to devices of representation through a congress that was maintained but structured around a bipartisanship organised from above, and thus more fictitious than genuine. Unable to institutionalise their power without at the same time using coercion, the military preferred to withdraw in favour of a civilian authority.

In Russia the eclipse of the communist model took place under the aegis of the Party within the framework of what was called “glasnost” and “perestroika”. As in Brasilia, it was the existing powers’ awareness of the irresistible need for adaptation that led to a young party official in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev rising to leadership of the CPSU with a mission to promote change within continuity.4 The project was in fact to give the regime a new lease of life by agreeing to necessary reforms in the fields of both public and economic liberty. As it turned out the creature escaped from its creator and this led to an unplanned upheaval incarnated by Boris Yeltsin from 1991. By contrast the scenario in China, starting out from the same acknowledgement of the inevitability of change and from the erosion of the Maoist model, bore witness to the power of the single party, able to carry out the necessary transformation with out in any way surrendering its role as permanent conductor of the orchestra. Here change within continuity showed itself in all its splendour. The exhaustion of the ruling authorities, in accordance with Chairman Mao’s formulation, induced the leaders in China to proceed with a transformation in the function of the existing political arrangements and not to their eradication.

So all these emerging states find themselves confronting the same challenge of a “great transformation” which they carry out ballasted by the weight of their traditions of authority, but not prisoners of them. The structure of history does not constitute a mechanical repetition of the past but offers permanent innovation where forms of atavism and the autonomy of the agents of change are interwoven. These emerging states are a good demonstration of how their respective histories do not constitute, in Fernand Braudel’s expression, “long-term prisons”.

The new forms of power reflect the tension between a past which is still there and the challenges now to be faced, beginning with finding a place in the great world market in which the new powers intend to play a major role. The process of political modernisation is defined in an idiosyncratic manner through the new institutions set in place.

In Brazil, as Jorge Barrientos-Parra and Lizandro de Fátima Donato show, liberal democracy follows in the apparent tracks of the American presidential model. This is in appearance, because the authors of the constitution are sheltered by a two-fold distrust: of a president whose omnipotence regarding the very rules of the presidential regime based on the strict separation of powers was to be feared; of a congress whose ineffectiveness is to be feared in respect of the client culture which structures political loyalties in the lineage of links of personal subordination shaped out of the submission structures prevailing in large estates under the aegis of coronels.5 To channel presidential superpower the Brazilian constitution framer sought to multiply constitutional devices to set the firmest possible boundaries to presidential action in the implementation of public policy. Above all the judiciary was given the duty of acting as a counterweight to possible presidential excess. Hence the importance of the impeachment process which leads to turning what should be a matter of political responsibility into one of criminal responsibility. On this point Brazilian political history has transformed impeachment. While constitutionalism maintains impeachment as an exceptional procedure, Brazilian impeachment has been made into a normal, almost banal, check on power, on the way to becoming the means by which a challenge to presidential power is conveyed.6 In the desire to lay the ghost of its Caudillist past Brazil has given birth to an unbalanced democracy haunted by an obsession with the abuse of power.

Russia is not reluctant to take on board the past which cannot altogether be discarded. The constitutional-pluralist model engraved in stone after the watershed of 1991 endorses a form of presidential supremacy and so continues a tsarist/caesarist tradition deeply rooted in Russian history.7 The Yeltsin interlude being finally over, the reinstatement of the political order was effected according to the principle of “vertical power”. The restraints on power were progressively weakened, beginning with parliament, the Duma, strengthening Vladimir Putin’s hold on all institutions. Opposition to presidential omnipotence is pushed into the margins, particularly as the chief of state controls the outcome of the competition between political forces through his dominant party, United Russia. Elections are not a simple fake: they allow opposition between parties and free choice for electors, while at the same time de facto eliminating any chance of a change. In this the Russian and Turkish regimes converge in what Ayhan Kaya calls “electoral authoritarianism”. It would be altogether wrong to reduce this super-presidential regime as it is described by Alexander Duka to a simple exercise in personal domination. Behind the figure of the republican tsar embodied in Vladimir Putin there is the outline of a “superior administrative elite” which has worked ceaselessly to unify itself and consolidate its position.

This oligarchic trend at work in Moscow is repeated in Beijing. The supremacy of the single party can also operate as a veil if observation stops there. The Chinese regime did not prevent either the emergence of a figure incarnating power or the affirmation of the elite. As Wenhua Jia points out the monarchy-oligarchy reflects the reality of the political model in place today in the former Middle Kingdom. The elitist phenomenon is indissociable from any process of domination and consecrates the supremacy of a new social class which is distinguished by its codes, its “social spaces” (saunas, hunting parties… spoken of by Alexander Duka). The result, in Moscow as in Beijing, is a “self-segregation” which directly participates in the consolidation of power.8

But this, like a Danish pastry, has not yet completely finished revealing its successive layers. Beyond the institutions and those in power such as they let themselves be seen, there is a whole group of informal practices which are essential for maintaining the grip on power. The merging of different segments that constitute the elite is an obligatory path which demands the mobilisation of resources which often override official rules. With this in view, the territorial dimension is a major constraint in strategies for domination in particular in those states where the size of the land area, at least in the cases of Brazil, Russia or China, makes them the size of quasi continents. Controlling the periphery requires recourse to alliances between different public and private actors. Bureaucrats and notables, to use the terms employed by Pierre Grémion9 together fashion a peripheral coalition which, far from being opposed to the centre, contribute to its consolidation. According to the mechanisms of political exchange, the periphery agrees to submit to central power on condition that it receives a certain autonomy where its own rules will apply. The analysis of Alla Chirikova highlights a triangle of local power where the governor, representing the central power, is impelled to comply with local politicians but also and above all with the world of business. The vertical power structure which descends from Moscow only works when there are adaptations and compromises with other segments of the elite. Like in the case of the prefect in France, a good governor is a bureaucrat who is above all able to prevent conflicts and protest movements. It is in the constitution of this alliance between the different components of the elite under the authority of its administration that corruption can flourish. Politics, the administration, business, and organised crime as well form a tangle of networks, all mutually interdependent. Conversely to the watertight principle which is supposed to characterise the smooth functioning of the legal-rational state, all the sectors interact according to a functional porosity which aims at ensuring the stability of the system. Corruption is not an end in itself but the means by which the particles stick together giving rise to the formation of a leading class. This bloc in power works to ensure its domination in Moscow, as it does in Brasilia, in Beijing as in Ankara. The similarity between the instruments deployed is tantamount to a veritable ‘social contract’ (A. Duka) whereby the elite in power seeks to consolidate its hegemonic hold over the Gramscian mode to which Ayhan Kaya refers in relation to Turkey.

The challenge is not insignificant and it reflects the obstacles and resistances which the ruling classes in these emerging states come up against. The intensive use made of informal practices certainly allows an alliance between the multiple interests of differing kinds to be sealed. But it cannot allow itself to be seen in its raw nakedness without weakening the domination process. And this explains the ideological stake whose function is to stimulate support for the power by masking that which could on the contrary alter the quest for legitimacy by the ruling elite. From this point of view the emerging powers present different profiles.

Everywhere, the aggregation process of the ruling bloc proves to be complicated because of integration into the world markets and the major tole that these new powers intend to play there. The world market consists of both an opportunity and a threat to social balances. Each deploys an arsenal of representations aiming at creating a common mental universe. In Turkey, professional Islamic intellectuals are mobilised with a view to justifying the legitimate foundations of the conservative democracy advocated by the regime. What is at stake is the discrediting of the old order which was secular and therefore arbitrary and oppressive and the advantage of the new order which guarantees authentic freedoms and social justice. In an original kind of synthesis, the Turkish model redesigns the social contract, substituting a solidarity exercised by Islamic groups for the welfare state. All of society is enveloped in a policy of “controlling the masses” as Ayhan Kaya puts it. The formation of an integral state that brings together public and private actors has become the base of a new process of domination put in place in both Ankara and Moscow.

In Russia, the ruling bloc is busy weaving a narrative where the present is inscribed in a heritage which it would be perilous to ignore. The vertical structure of the state, with Vladimir Putin at its epicentre, aims at seeming less than the affirmation of an authoritarian leader and rather more as faithfulness to a permanence of legitimate authority handed down from the former tsars. Today’s power is thus presented as the continuity of a normal and desirable form of government, the heir to a glorious past where Peter the Great and Catherine the Great symbolise prestige. In such a discourse, the grandeur of Russia is also and maybe above all linked to the uncommon qualities of its leaders. Should they renounce this incarnation which they bear then the very survival of Russia would be in danger. This explains the president’s insistence on cultivating the meticulous staging of his own person including his physical attributes.10 In eternal Russia, power is personified and Vladimir Putin is the continuation of a long chain whose perennity he ensures. But this personification-incarnation is only effective if it is linked with a transcendence which bestows upon him an indisputable aura. Politics and religion make an indivisible couple. Thus the Orthodox Church finds its place in the ideological device deployed by Russian power.11

The mobilisation of traditional symbolic resources is not totally avoided in China where neo-Confucian temptation operates in certain circles of power. The hegemony of the Communist Party is thus destabilised by the radical nature of the changes that are going on. The policy of conservative modernisation currently applied by Beijing poses the question of the legitimacy of the power bloc and therefore of the Communist Party. The fact that the party is the force behind the change reduces the number of ideological resources available. The construction of a new narration by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin in their respective countries cannot be copied in China unless the Communist Party revives the very foundations of its identity thereby casting doubt on its own power. The elements of ideological resourcing must therefore be sought elsewhere. The energy behind the anti-corruption campaign, referred to by Ting Yan, forms part of a hegemonic reconquest of a society still suffering from the shock of a socio-economic transformation that was exceptionally radical. By officially identifying those responsible for the ills that everyone experienced in their environment, the Communist Party has highlighted a discourse aiming to reaffirm the purity of the ruling class and its legitimacy in governing, and this especially since 2012 and the rise to power of Xi Jinping.12

All anti-corruption campaigns do not however relate to an ideological strategy aiming at consolidating those in power. Far from participating in the reinforcement of a leading elite it can, on the contrary, express the tensions experienced in different sectors of the elite and thus the lack of hegemony. The case of Brazil is symptomatic from this point of view. The impeachment of President Dilma Roussef in mid-2016 seems to be less than the end of a crisis and more of an episode in a series whose outcome is unsure. Accusations of falsifying public accounts with a view to delegitimising the president, and through her, the Workers’ Party, shows above all the intensity of the struggle between the leading factions without any of them really being capable of setting themselves up as focus around which the other segments of the elite would gather. The fact that the new president, Michel Temer, Dilma Roussef’s vice-president and her successor, in conformity with the constitutional rules, has in his turn been implicated in a corruption scandal, just like the vast majority of Brazilian politicians, sheds light on the lack of homogeneous power and the hegemonic crisis which Brazil is facing today.

Finally, the question of hegemony highlights the different kinds of situations within the category of new emerging powers. The case of Brazil is a reminder of those historic moments when, particularly in Latin America, diverging leading factions could not settle their differences either as a historic compromise or else by the supremacy of one faction over the others, precipitating the questioning of the regime itself. The future will tell whether the institutions adopted in 1987 will be able to act as a melting pot for the consolidation of the state. Without giving free rein to making a tempting prospective, whose dangers are well known, the contributions gathered here nevertheless provide some elements of a response. At the end of the day, the Chinese state seems to be hugely solid, which Ting Yan underlines, and this is thanks to an institutional congruence of the devices that have been set up in the three economic, social and political fields. This secure nature therefore allows diverging concepts about the nature of change to be expressed. The field of ideas is permeated by an intellectuals’ debate, between those who defend a liberal approach (Liberal School) and an approach which conforms to Communist doctrine (New Left School) which, according to Wenhua Jia, reveals a split between optimists and pessimists. The fact that the debate focusses on the issue of rights (natural rights and the people’s rights expressed by the party) doubtless illustrates mainly all the intensity of the historic mutations that have already taken place in Beijing under the effect of modernisation. It also demonstrates the quest for a political formula, as Gaetano Mosca puts it, which would allow a reply to be made to the contradictions inherent in the path towards change deliberately taken by the regime.

This search for a political formula seems more explicit in its content both in Turkey and in Russia. The alliance drawn up in Ankara between neo-liberalism and Islamism, just like the republican neo-caesarism set up in Moscow, both bear witness to a progress which, although it may not yet be complete, seems to be both precise in its ingredients and in the way they are deployed.

The thinking about this, as may be understood, is far from over. The writings brought together here make a modest contribution to the still tentative scientific construction on emerging powers. Our wish is that these contributions can feed into the current debates as well as those to come.

1BRICS brings together five countries; Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The acronym, forged in 2001 by Goldman Sachs bank, has since spread to the world of private and public decision-makers and to the academic sphere. E7 is an acronym for the first four countries of BRICS together with Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey. PPICS brings together countries distinguished by their economic dynamism and therefore called to play a growing role in international affairs: Peru, the Philippines, Indonesia, Columbia and Sri Lanka.

2 To reduce the risks of either omission or arbitrariness the reader can usefully consult available bibliographies on the topic of emergence, among them that of the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Sussex, “Rising Powers in International Development”. An annotated bibliography directed by Mousab Younis, March 2013. Also see the website “Rising Powers Initiative” set up by The Elliot School for International Affairs’ in Washington (USA).

3 “The exhaustion of the security system is evident. A good part of the electorate turns its back on the military-bureaucratic state and the political class which it considers as a puppet” writes Ahmet Insel, in La Nouvelle Turquie d’Erdogan. Du rêve démocratique à la dérive autoritaire, Paris, La Découverte, 2015, p. 55.

4 See particularly Françoise Thom, Le Moment Gorbatchev, Paris, Hachette, 1989.

5 Social structures in the large estates, inherited from colonialism, rested on the dependence of the agricultural worker on his patron/landowner, who was called a “coronel”. See Michel Faure, Une histoire du Brésil, Paris, Perrin, 2016.

6 Since adoption of the constitution two presidents have been the subjects of impeachment procedures; Ferdinand Collor de Mello, forced into resignation in 1992 before the process begun against him had run its course, and Dilma Roussef, removed from office in 2016 at the outset of the process. For an analysis of Brazil in the face of its challenges today, see Alain Rouquié, Le Brésil au xxie siècle, naissance d’un nouveau grand, Paris, Fayard, 2006.

7 On the Russian regime we shall refer to the analysis by Jean-Robert Raviot, Démocratie à la russe. Pouvoir et contre-pouvoir en Russie, Paris, Ellipses, 2008.

8 Stéphanie Balme, Entre soi, l’élite du pouvoir dans la Chine contemporaine, Paris, Fayard, 2004.

9 Pierre Grémion, Le Pouvoir périphérique. Bureaucrates et notables dans le système politique français, Paris, Le Seuil, 1976.

10 It is fairly commonplace for Western media to mock what is seen as the Russian president’s penchant for a virile, physical appearance. Such criticism ignores the symbolic dimension sought by the man in power. Through the image that he gives of himself the president is flagging up his own aptitude for domination, which is inscribed in the global process of legitimisation.

11 To understand the politico-ideological process operating in Russia, see the analysis carried out by Michel Eltchaninoff, Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine, Paris, Solin/Actes Sud, 2015.

12 Revelations under the authority of judicial organisations about corruption scandals show how this is a widespread phenomenon. These revelations also aim at clearing the leaders by demonstrating their unshakeable desire to eradicate this scourge. Television got hold of this topic and broadcast a series called “In the Name of the People” whose considerable success shows both the spread of this corruption phenomenon and the success of the ideological undertaking led by the Chinese authorities.

Executive-Judiciary Relationships and the Strengthening of the Judiciary in Brazilian Presidentialism

Jorge Barrientos-Parra Lizandra de FÁTIMA DONATO

Introduction

This chapter analyses the Brazilian political regime from a socio-juridical standpoint, but our initial hypothesis and our approach are interspersed with reference to works of political science, which are complementary to our main point of view.

In a very well-known article “Presidencialismo de coalizão: o dilema institucional brasileiro”,13 Sergio Abranches used the expression ‘coalition presidentialism’ to designate the Brazilian political regime, whose particular features were federalism and “the combination of proportional representation, many political parties,14 ‘imperial presidentialism’ and organisation of the Executive based on large coalitions”. According to this author a model like this requires additional conflict-resolution mechanisms because coalition governments, based as they are on highly diverse structures of interest, are extremely unstable. Besides, in the context of a presidential regime they tend to destabilise that regime, and in this context coalitions, while they may be inevitable, prove inefficient and unable to give steady support to government.

We shall show the coalition presidentialism reveals itself as very effective from the point of view of governability, and that the checks and balances in this model derive from judicial power, even though it does not always fulfil this political role.

Characteristics of Brazalian presidentialism

It is vital first to emphasise the importance of the 1988 Constitution as the foundation and source of Brazil’s democracy and political regime. Conservative circles wrongly foresaw that Brazil would become ungovernable after the promulgation of the Constitution. They miscalculated the implications and extent of union rights granted to the workers, as well as the other rights it established.15 On the other hand, despite its apparent rigidity, this political charter manifested great suppleness, for adopting a constitutional amendment required the consent of three-fifths of the members of the Chamber of Deputies and of the Senate. By August 2014 eighty-three constitutional amendments had been adopted!

Thus the 1988 Constitution forms the basis of a better political and social organisation than emergency rule, and enshrines – historically – the rights of excluded social classes, while guaranteeing democratic freedoms (Barrientos-Parra 2011: 17). The system of government is presidential (Article 76). The President of the Republic, like State and Federal District governors, is elected by an absolute majority of votes for a term of four years, and may be re-elected only once (Article 14, § 5o). Let us examine the juridical and political features of Brazilian presidentialism.

Juridical characteristics

In 1987 the authors of the Constitution followed the Brazilian presidentialist tradition which goes back to the proclamation of the Republic in 1889 and has three fundamental features.

The first is the separation of powers, distinguishing, according to Montesquieu, the three functions of the state: executive, legislative and judicial. These functions are allocated to independent organisations which exercise them relatively exclusively. According to Brossard (1992: 131), ‘Each power is, in the exercise of its own capacities, in a sense sovereign over and hence superior to the others, but only in matters which are exclusive to and characteristic of them.’16...