Suchergebnisse

AbstractConstitutional pluralism is a theory for the post-sovereign European state. This only makes sense historically, emerging out of postwar European reconstruction through the repression of popular sovereignty and restraining of democracy, including through the project of European integration. It became unsettled at Maastricht and evolved from a series of irritants into a full-blown crisis in the recent decade, with sovereignty claims returning both from the bottom-up and the top-down, to the extent that we can legitimately ask whether we are now moving 'beyond the post-sovereign state'? Constitutional pluralist literature fails to capture this in that evades material issues of democracy and political economy.

The differences between ordo- and neoliberalism are many and varied. This article suggests, however, that in directing the constitutional dynamic of European integration and postwar reconstruction, ordo- and neoliberalism represent a single movement: a conjunction of political authoritarianism and economic liberalism in opposition to democracy and especially in opposition to democratic constituent power. This dynamic becomes more evident with the Euro-crisis response, but it represents the deeper logic of postwar reconstruction. With a longer historical arc in view, authoritarian liberalism can be traced as a reaction to the interwar breakdown of liberal democracy, based on a narrow diagnosis of democratic collapse. Postwar Europe is thus reconstituted on the basis of a substitution of economic for political freedom as a legitimating device for the new constitutional imagination.