The Eternal Territory? The Crimean Crisis and Ukraine's Territorial Integrity as an Unamendable Constitutional Principle

Abstract This article reflects on the protection of territorial integrity in the Ukrainian constitution, especially on its provision of unamendability, against the backdrop of the 2014 Crimean crisis. At the general level, we examine whether constitutional theory can offer answers when confronted with the apparent inefficacy of a constitutional claim to eternity. More specifically, we focus on what the Ukrainian case can teach us about the implications of designating territorial integrity or indivisibility of a state as an eternal/unamendable constitutional principle. Building on insights from the Crimean crisis, we argue that the unamendable protection of territorial integrity is an especially ineffective type of eternity clause because it is subject to both the internal threat of secession and the external risk of forceful annexation, The preservative promise of unamendable territorial integrity is severely curtailed by this double vulnerability, even when backed by a constitutional court with far-reaching powers of judicial review. Territorial integrity as an eternal constitutional principle then remains merely aspirational. Moreover, we argue that the act of entrenching territorial protection as an unamendable principle is in clear tension with the idea of popular sovereignty and with mechanisms for expressing popular will. East-Central European constitutions play like songs of the liturgy on a very old gramophone. You hear the expected music performed in the service of constitutionalism, but you hear it with a crackle in the background. The performance is old-fashioned in order to receive the nulla obstat of the Council of Europe and sometimes (when territorial integrity comes up) the soprano's voice suffers from hysteria.