It is almost axiomatic that there are three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. There are various speculations about the so-called “fourth estate” — the press and its influence on society, but this should be understood as a poetic term.
Where did this all come from? Even Aristotle wrote about the separation of powers, and the theoretical foundation for it was laid out, or rationalized, by Charles-Louis Montesquieu—a man whose surname proves the necessity of the letter ё in the Russian language. However, the history of the emergence of the separation of powers is not what matters, because it seems to be a natural concept. Courts, for example, must be independent of anyone if we want to have a stable and just society. It is also inappropriate for those who are involved in administration to write laws for themselves. Otherwise, they could write anything they want and grant themselves excessive powers. But they should not be subordinate to the chief judge either, as then there would be no one to arrest dishonest judges. And since the executors act according to certain laws, there must be those who write these laws or, if they are given from above, interpret them appropriately. In a small community, the laws are dictated by the community itself; often, the laws are not even written down, and people are guided by concepts of justice. Sometimes, a sacred text serves as the law, whether it be the Quran, the Bible, or the Torah, and then only judges are needed to adjudicate based on, say, Sharia.
The legislative branch of power is extremely useful when the monster at the top tries to legitimize its greedy impulses by legalizing control over anything or anyone. A typical example is Ukraine’s “Insurance Law.” It appears to be written with the noble intention of protecting citizens from dishonest insurers and fraudsters, but in reality, that doesn’t happen. Instead, it legalizes money laundering schemes, effectively bans any insurance activities that cannot be controlled and are not profitable for the monsters in power, and fosters a corrupt hydra with a bureaucratic grin. In the homeland of modern insurance—Great Britain—there was no “Insurance Law” until recently, and only a document was created that does not regulate insurers’ activities but merely outlines the established practices on paper. Interestingly, despite the absence of a law, London insurers are somehow trusted more than their Kyiv counterparts, despite the legal requirements for large charter funds, insurance reserves, and the activities of an insurance regulator.
The division of power into three independent branches with those specific names is not a dogma. The principle of separation of powers itself is also not a dogma. In the United Kingdom, for example, despite Montesquieu referring to it as an example of separation of powers, there are clear signs of a blending of the legislative and executive branches. Yes, the courts in the UK are largely guided by precedents rather than laws and codes. Moreover, the cabinet is heavily dependent on Parliament and is more of an executive body of Parliament rather than an independent branch of power. In countries where there is a blending of branches of power, societal stability is ensured by a bicameral parliament.
If you take a close look at the process of power formation and how various branches of government acquire certain powers, you may feel a strong desire to ensure that elections, say, for parliament, are controlled and conducted not by the cabinet of ministers, but by some independent body. In other words, we should consider the creation of an “electoral authority”—a body that can ensure the independence of elections from the other branches of government. Without an independent “electoral” authority, sooner or later elections will be conducted in a manner that suits the head of the executive branch, and their outcomes will align with his expectations. This is why, in several countries, specifically Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Kingdom, electoral commissions operate independently of the executive branch and are funded by their own budget. In some of these countries, the independence of the electoral commission is guaranteed by the Constitution, such as Article 190 of the Constitution of South Africa.
The principle of separation of powers is present not only in the state system. For example, in joint-stock companies, there are also several branches of governance: the shareholders’ meeting creates at least three independent bodies that report solely to it: the supervisory board, which is analogous to the legislative branch; the management board, which is analogous to the executive branch; and the audit commission—there is no direct analogy for this. In joint-stock companies, there is something that is also present in several countries, such as Taiwan—an auditing branch of power. The auditing branch is also present in the governing bodies of the European Union. The idea of auditing government bodies exists in Ukraine as well, but the State Audit Office and the State Financial Inspection cannot be impartial auditors, as they belong to the legislative and executive branches of power, respectively.
Thus, a proper and stable state should include various branches of power, which must be independent of one another and formed by a single source of authority—the people, or in corporate law terms, the “shareholders’ meeting.” These branches can include: legislative, executive, judicial, auditing, and electoral powers. If society believes that all laws have already been written, the formation of new rules can be carried out either by judges, based on precedents, or by the executive power, which would be accountable to, say, the auditing authority.
One could also envision an institution of electoral authority, whose representatives and leaders are elected by the people on a voluntary basis, meaning without interrupting their main activities. This authority would have no other powers except for conducting elections, inaugurating elected representatives of other branches of government, granting or revoking their immunity, and initiating the procedure for the early recall of elected representatives or their impeachment. In Ukraine, it seems somewhat ridiculous and absurd for the parliament to make attempts to lift its own immunity or to successfully initiate salary increases and expand privileges for itself.
However, there is another possible branch of power. In the USSR, a socialist political and legal doctrine prevailed, which rejected the principle of separation of powers as bourgeois and unacceptable. The unified state power was proclaimed as the power of the Soviets, meaning the power of representative bodies. But it was precisely in the USSR, just as in China and Iran, that another branch of power emerged—ideological. The party (and in Iran, the Islamic leadership headed by the Ayatollah) conducted an ideological audit of the other branches of power, which still existed in the country, and to ensure the enforcement of its will, it possessed its own coercive apparatus (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) or integrated its own levers of control into the existing power structure (the institution of political officers and commissars in the army).
The resilience demonstrated by both the USSR and the regime of the Ayatollahs in an entirely hostile environment was rooted in the fact that there was a principled and strict separation of powers in these countries, with the ideological branch functioning as an independent force. China, unlike the USSR, did not collapse precisely because the party nomenclature did not engage in business and did not intermingle with the other branches of power.
Societies with a separation of powers are more stable than those where power is concentrated in a single branch, and therefore, in the hands of the leader of that branch. On one hand, the concentration of power around a strong leader can mobilize the entire country to tackle certain tasks. On the other hand, there is no genius who can possess all the information necessary to determine which tasks are the most urgent. Moreover, concentrating power in one person’s hands fosters the rise of totalitarianism, corruption, and the enrichment of the country’s leader.
But let’s return to the USSR. During the wave of perestroika, when American jeans, chewing gum, and movies began to permeate the cultural landscape of the Soviet Union, it seemed right and logical to people that the country should have a president. In the USSR, there was no “president.” There was the “Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR,” who was the head of the legislative branch. There was the “Chairman of the Council of Ministers,” who was the head of the executive branch. There was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, who was the head of the ideological power. At times, all these positions were held by the same person, and at other times by different people, but there was no president in the country. This was not good. People had already embraced jeans and sneakers, and even cooperatives had started to manage chewing gum somehow, but there was still no president. Then the “wind of change” brought us the position of President. It was assumed by the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, who de facto was the supreme leader of the country and thus matched the level of authority of the President of the United States. Mikhail Gorbachev was president for a short time, but importantly, the idea of a president as a strong leader with significant powers was automatically transferred to the republics of the USSR, which were becoming independent countries.
The idea did not fully take root in the Baltic states, which, despite having presidents, are still governed by parliament rather than by the president. However, unlike in the United States, where the president is the head of the executive branch or, as we would say, the “prime minister,” to whom the government departments, or ministries, report, in the USSR and later in the republics, the president existed alongside the executive branch. Yet, contrary to the idea of separation of powers, the president held both executive and legislative authority.
Nevertheless, in the absence of… ideological The branches of power, the position of the General Secretary of the Central Committee or, later, the President, became somewhat unnecessary. And despite the fact that in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus the presidential apparatus is located in the building of the party’s Central Committee, the president does not have a “party” function. However, there are powers to issue legislative documents—”decrees,” there is practically the right to form a government at will, there is a personal administration and its own management, there is the right to appoint or significantly influence the appointment of local leaders, and there is the ability to influence the course of elections and thus shape “their” parliament.
If the party’s Central Committee represented a separate independent branch of power that guaranteed the stability of society and oversaw the other branches, then the president’s apparatus did not perform any functions of an independent branch of power. On the contrary, it fiercely competed with, and importantly, gradually usurped authority and control over the legislative and executive branches. While party leaders were once guided by the idea of communism, now, in the absence of ideology, the presidents of the former Soviet republics are driven solely by their own profit motives. The very idea of having a “strong” president existing alongside the other branches of power, competing with them and exerting direct influence over them, inevitably leads the country into an authoritarian regime, with virtually no exceptions.
There is no such system of government that has emerged and exists in the former republics of the USSR in any country that can boast of freedom, democracy, transparency in governance, low levels of corruption, and stability. However, a similar structure can be found in many third-world countries. The more hopeless the situation in these countries, the more power tends to be concentrated in the hands of a single individual.