Supreme Court, if it is proved to the satisfaction of the courts that the rights of
a citizen have been contravened by the implementation of a law, that law is
effectively invalidated. Other systems have more of a persuasive or partial
effect. So, for example, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,
incorporated in The Constitution Act, 1982, states that the rights it lists are
guaranteed unless legal limits ‘can be demonstrably justified in a free and
democratic society’. The English bill of rights has virtually no effect, in part
because it has little relevance to modern legislation, but more fundamentally
because the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy and the absence of a written
constitution means that no previous act can constrain a later one. However, the
passage of theHuman Rights Actin 1998 has incorporated into English law
the European Convention on Human Rights, with dramatic effects on the
English judicial approach to citizens’ rights.
Bipolar
In traditionalbalance-of-powertheory an international system of fluid
alliances exists within a group of perhaps three to five significant, but roughly
equal, military powers (seeCongress of Vienna). Any emergence of super-
iority by a single power or alliance was supposed to result in a regrouping of the
states to restore a balance; this logical arrangement, however, ignores the
possible influence of political ideologies within international relations. For
most of the post-Second World War period international relations have been
dominated by twosuperpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, dominating
more or less formal coalitions of allies. To accommodate this state within
balance-of-power theory the idea of bipolarity was developed. Bipolar systems
tend to stability, but at the cost of endlessarms racesas each polar group seeks
for temporary dominance—hence the cycle ofcold warandde ́tenteexperi-
enced from 1945 until the last decade of the 20th century. The collapse of
Soviet power in the early 1990s potentially rendered the international system
extremely unstable, because it has not reverted to the historical form of
multipolarity, with several roughly equal power blocks. Instead, bipolarity
has been succeeded by what should technically be described as a ‘dominant
member multipolar system’, in which there are several moderately powerful
nations and one, the USA, potentially able to dominate any coalition among
them. In conventional balance-of-power thinking all the other actors should
ally to offset the dominance of the USA; this, of course, is not likely to happen.
Bolshevik
The Bolshevik movement was one branch of the revolutionary movement in
pre-1917 Russia. It originated from the split at the Second Congress of the All-
Bolshevik