Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine’s language regime has evolved in a context of intense cultural heterogeneity. The most crucial element of the language situation in Ukraine concerns cohabitation and intermingling between Ukrainian and Russian language-oriented populations. Ukraine’s competitive state tradition produced a contested language regime. Formed at the crossroads of civilizations, it has been influenced by both East and West. The critical juncture of Ukraine’s independence marked a rupture with its past and generated a new language regime that actively embraced priority for the Ukrainian language. But because of its competitive state tradition, this language regime remained unsettled, solidifying only gradually and non-linearly. Inherited institutions that were both executive dominant and fragmented produced radical shifts when new elites took power. Through these shifts, Ukraine’s language regime has gradually coalesced around a dominant conception, though the tradition of competitiveness remains. Ukraine’s language regime reveals the embedded normative and institutional legacies of its experience under Russian and Soviet rule, as well as the reactive nationalism this imposition provoked. It continues to occupy a crossroads, pulled at once by East and West, paradoxically asserting the very monolingual nationalism perfected in Europe but now cautioned by appeals to minority language rights.

This chapter identifies the several factors (such as precedent, congressional deference, and Supreme Court decisions) that have allowed the executive branch to dominate American foreign policy making.

This chapter tackles two prominent critiques of parliamentary Bills of Rights, namely, that they are thwarted by the Executive dominance of Parliament in Westminster systems, or that parliamentary deliberation about rights is vulnerable to policy distortion and debilitation by the existence of judicial decision making about rights. Charting a course ’from domination to collaboration’, this chapter responds that both these critiques exaggerate the drivers of dominance, with respect to the Executive and especially with respect to the courts. Drawing on recent political science scholarship in Westminster Parliaments, the chapter argues that the Executive is not as dominant and dictatorial as is assumed in popular lore. Moreover, an empirical analysis of political and parliamentary behaviour in the post-HRA era challenges the assertion that the key political actors succumb to a cringing court mimicry. Whilst remaining attentive to the dangers in both directions – i.e. in the direction of Executive aggrandisement or judicial supremacy – this chapter argues that we need to put these threats in perspective. The upshot is a complex picture of constitutional collaboration between powerful political actors, not the straightforward or simple dominance of one over the other.