Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:50:45.183Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Beyond the Post-Sovereign State?: The Past, Present, and Future of Constitutional Pluralism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2019

Michael WILKINSON
Michael WILKINSON*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Constitutional 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.

Keywords

constitutional pluralismsovereigntypost-sovereigntydemocracypolitical economy
Type
Symposium
Information
Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies , Volume 21 , December 2019 , pp. 6 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Centre for European Legal Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Cormac Mac Amhlaigh and Kenneth Armstrong for comments on an earlier draft.

References

1 MacCormick, N, ‘Beyond the Sovereign State’ (1993) 56(1) Modern Law Review 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Ibid, p 1.

3 MacCormick, N, Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State and Nation in the European Commonwealth (Oxford University Press, 2002), p 142Google Scholar.

4 See MacCormick, note 1 above, p 18.

5 See Wilkinson, M, ‘The Reconstitution of Postwar Europe: Liberal Excesses, Democratic Deficiencies’ in Dowdle, M and Wilkinson, M (eds), Constitutionalism Beyond Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2017), p 38Google Scholar.

6 The repression of the concept of sovereignty in fact suggests the EU is in that respect a classic federation, a third type besides the loose confederation of sovereign states and the federal state. See eg Beaud, O, Theorie de la Federation (Presses Universitaires de France, 2009)Google Scholar.

7 Brunner v European Union Treaty (Case 2 BvR 2134/92 and 2959/92 JZ 1993, 1100) [1994] 1 CMLR 57.

8 See U Beck, German Europe (Polity Press, 2013).

9 For a recent restatement see Walker, N, ‘Constitutional Pluralism Revisited’ (2016) 22 European Law Journal 333CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Amongst constitutional pluralists Walker's account is more cautious about claims to have overcome sovereignty and more insistent on presenting constitutional pluralism as a matter of political as much as legal theory. Walker's term ‘late sovereignty’ rather than ‘post-sovereignty’ illustrates this more nuanced view on the enduring legacy of the concept, see Walker, N, ‘Late Sovereignty in the European Union’ in Walker, N (ed) Sovereignty in Transition (Hart Publishing, 2003)Google Scholar.

10 MacCormick, N, ‘The Maastricht-Urteil: Sovereignty Now’ (1995) 1(3) European Law Journal 259, p 264CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See Bryde, B-O, ‘The ECJ's Fundamental Rights Jurisprudence – A Milestone in Transnational Constitutionalism’ in Maduro, M P and Azoulai, L M (eds) The Past and Future of EU Law (Hart Publishing, 2010)Google Scholar.

12 See MacCormick, note 10 above.

13 The idea of pluralism under international law is, he concludes, ‘contextually more persuasive and appropriate’ (MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, note 3 above, p 121). Although if the discretion of national courts is qualified by their international obligations, there is little specification of precisely what those entail (see eg ibid, p 117).

14 See eg ibid, p 10.

15 MacCormick, note 1 above, p 16. Repeated less assertively in MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, note 3 above, p 126. In the final iteration, eschewing any form of radical pluralism, MacCormick suggests that conflicts between domestic and EU law should ultimately be determined, in Kelsenian fashion, by norms of international law.

16 MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, note 3 above, ch 9.

17 Ibid, p 93.

18 Ibid, pp 94–95. Since, according to the internal view of UK officials sovereignty remains with the UK constitution, but according to EC officials it lies with the Treaties, MacCormick argues that the theorist seeking a disinterested perspective ‘can entertain both or several views cognitively, suspending any question of volitional commitment to one or another. Instead of committing oneself to a monocular vision dictated by sovereignty theory, one can embrace the possibility of acknowledging differences of perspective, differences of points of view’. MacCormick, note 1 above, p 6.

19 MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, note 3 above, p 119.

20 Italics added.

21 MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, note 3 above, p 119.

22 HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon, 1961).

23 This, essentially, is Martin Loughlin's challenge (note 13 above), to which MacCormick struggles to respond. See MacCormick, N, ‘Questioning Post-Sovereignty’ (2004) 29 European Law Review 852Google Scholar.

24 MacCormick, note 1 above, p 4.

25 MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, note 3 above, p 95.

26 See Loughlin, M, ‘Constitutional Pluralism: An Oxymoron?’ (2014) Global Constitutionalism 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Matthias Kumm moves beyond the positive law by situating constitutional pluralism in the domain of morality, suggesting ‘applicable reasons of a general practical nature that are determinative for deciding the issue [of Kompetenz-Kompetenz] one way or another’. Kumm, M, ‘The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Conflict’ (2005) 11(3) European Law Journal 262CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Kumm, M, ‘The Cosmopolitan Turn in Constitutionalism: On the Relationship between Constitutionalism in and Beyond the State’ in Dunoff, J and Trachtman, J (eds) Ruling the World: Constitutionalism, International Law and Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp 268–70Google Scholar. Following MacCormick, albeit less excusably given the rise in sovereignty claims in the intervening years, he also proposes that ‘in the law of the European Union, the language of subsidiarity has completely replaced the language of sovereignty’. Ibid, p 293 (italics added). It is extraordinary that subsidiarity continued to exert hold of the constitutional pluralist imagination dispute the fact that its juristic career was an almost complete failure.

29 Avbelj, M and Komarek, J identify six versions, in their ‘Introduction’ to Constitutional Pluralism in the European Union and Beyond (Hart Publishing, 2012), pp 4–7Google Scholar.

30 MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, note 3 above, p 95.

31 See Jakab, A, European Constitutional Language (Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘Our task is to avoid or prevent the question, and if someone still poses it, then we should give a “solution” that does not say anything practical for conflicts’ (p 116). He goes on to suggest that the language of Staatslehre is ‘redundant’.

32 See eg A Somek, ‘Monism: A Tale of the Undead’ in Avbelj and Komarek (eds), note 29 above.

33 Cf Bomhoff, J, Balancing Constitutional Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Kahn, P, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Columbia University Press, 2011), p 81Google Scholar. He continues, ‘the court's decisional authority is inseparable from its claim to speak in the voice of the sovereign people … not the moral authority of Hercules but the political authority of We the People’. Ibid.

35 See Goldoni, M and Wilkinson, M, ‘The Material Constitution’ (2018) 81(4) Modern Law Review 567CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 See eg Jacobs, F, The Sovereignty of the Law: The European Way (Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The new histories of legal integration present the early push for supremacy of European law as akin to a juridical coup d’état. See Vauchez, A, ‘The Transnational Politics of Judicialisation: Van Gend en Loos and the Making of the EU Polity’ (2010) 16 European Law Journal 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, A, ‘Constitutionalism without Constitution: Transnational Elites between Mobilisation and Legal Expertise in the Making of a Constitution For Europe (1940's–1960's)’ (2007) 32 Law and Social Enquiry 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rasmussen, M, ‘The Origins of a Legal Revolution: The Early History of the European Court of Justice’ (2008) 14(2) Journal of European Integration History 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 For an elaboration of these basic building blocks, see Goldoni and Wilkinson, note 35 above.

38 See eg Wilkinson, M, ‘Authoritarian Liberalism in the European Constitutional Imagination: Second Time as Farce?’ (2015) 21(3) European Law Journal 313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 See Müller, J-W, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in 20th Century Europe (Yale University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

40 See Möllers, C, ‘We Are (Afraid of) the People: Constituent Power in German Constitutional Thought’ in Loughlin, M and Walker, N (eds), The Paradox of Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. The UK represents a different constitutional type, along with the sustained democracies of the Nordic countries.

41 With regard to the Italian constitutional court: cf Barsotti, V, Carozza, P, Cartabia, M, and Simoncini, A, Italian Constitutional Justice in the Global Context (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp 214–17Google Scholar.

42 See Friedrich, CJ, ‘The Political Thought of Neo-liberalism’ (1955) 49(2) American Political Science Review 509CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Foucault, MThe Birth of Biopolitics — Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008)Google Scholar.

43 See Wunsche, H F (ed), Rutter, Derek (trans), Standard Texts on Social Market Economy: Two Centuries of Discussion (Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1982), p ixGoogle Scholar. This reverses the original meaning of the economic constitution, which had meant democratic control of the economy and emancipation of the working class (in the work of Neumann and Sinzheimer). See eg Dukes, R, The Labour Constitution: The Enduring Idea of Labour Law (Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 See eg Maduro, M, We, the Court: The European Court of Justice and the Economic Constitution (Hart Publishing, 1998)Google Scholar.

45 For discussion, see De Witte, B, ‘The European Union as an International Legal Experiment’ in Búrca, G de and Weiler, J H H (eds), The Worlds of European Constitutionalism (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp 19–57Google Scholar.

46 See Pollicino, O and Fichera, M, ‘The Dialectics between Constitutional Identity and Common Constitutional Traditions. Which Language for Cooperative Constitutionalism in Europe?’ German Law Journal (forthcoming, 2019)Google Scholar.

47 See eg Bryde, note 11 above.

48 See eg Streek, W, ‘Citizens as Customers: Considerations on the New Politics of Consumption’ (2012) New Left Review 27Google Scholar

49 See Müller, note 39 above.

50 Fromm, E, Escape from Freedom (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1941)Google Scholar. Authoritarianism here thus points towards a politically passive population in contrast to a highly charged, active authoritarianism.

51 This is carefully noted and outlined by Gibbs, N, ‘Post-Sovereignty and the European Legal Space’ (2017) 80(5) Modern Law Review 812, p 825CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Ibid (drawing on Marcel Gauchet).

53 See eg Hix, S and Føllesdal, A, ‘Why There Is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Reply to Majone and Moravscik’ (2006) 44(3) Journal of Common Market Studies 533Google Scholar.

54 See eg Bickerton, C, European Integration: From Nation-States to Member States (Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 See eg Crouch, C, Post-Democracy (Polity Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

56 There are at least three others alongside the German context: the sustained democracies, the Mediterranean Enlargements, and the Post-Soviet accessions. It is with the deepening and widening of the Maastricht era that the broader constitutional context starts to matter; in these four ‘varieties of constitutionalism’ sovereignty and hence post-sovereignty resonate differently. Post-sovereignty in the manner described above did not reflect in the same way the sustained democracies of the UK and Scandinavia, nor for the Mediterranean Enlargements. And for obvious historical reasons, fears of democratic and state sovereignty so central to the German post-war experience, and to those countries with direct experience of Fascism, would not resonate in countries transitioning from the Soviet bloc: their constitutional consciousness was characterised by a fear not of internal democratic collapse, but of externally repressed sovereignty under the Soviet regime.

57 See Vauchez, Cohen, and Rassmussen, note 36 above.

58 On the significance of sovereignty claims and sovereignty frames to the concept of sovereignty, see Walker, N, ‘Sovereignty Frames and Sovereignty Claims’ in Rawlings, R, Leyland, P, and Young, A (eds) Sovereignty and the Law: Domestic, European and International Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

59 Constitutional pluralism has an ambiguous relationship with the German Constitutional Court in general and its Maastricht-Urteil in particular. (Brunner, note 7 above). The significance of that judgment for generating the momentum for constitutional pluralist scholarship can hardly be doubted. But constitutional pluralism appears a defensive rear-guard reaction to its judgments, a series of attempts to domesticate them, to temper their potentially harmful effects on the European constitutionalist project and the post-sovereign condition.

60 See MacCormick, note 10 above, and MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, note 3 above, p 265.

61 MacCormick, note 10 above, p 259.

62 MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, note 3 above, p 265.

63 BVerfGE, 123/267 Judgment of 30 June 2009.

64 Schönberger, C, ‘Lisbon in Karslruhe: Maastricht's Epigones at Sea’ (2009) 10 German Law Journal 1201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 See Chambers, S, ‘Democracy, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Legitimacy’ (2004) 11 Constellations 153CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 See Heartfield, J, ‘A Process without a Subject’ in Bickerton, C, Cunliffe, P, and Gourevitch, A (eds), Politics without Sovereignty (Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

67 See Mair, P, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy (Verso, 2013)Google Scholar.

68 See Wilkinson, M, ‘Constitutional Pluralism: Chronicle of a Death Foretold?’ (2017) 23(3–4) European Law Journal 213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/soteu2018-speech_en_0.pdf.

70 See eg Lapavitsas, C and Flassbeck, H, Against the Troika: Crisis and Austerity in the Eurozone (Verso, 2015)Google Scholar

71 See Wilkinson, M, ‘The Euro is Irreversible! Or is it? On OMT, Austerity and the Threat of “Grexit”’ (2015) 16 German Law Journal 1049CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Habermas, J, ‘Remarks on Dieter Grimm's “Does Europe Need a Constitution”’ (1995) 1 European Law Journal 303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 MacCormick's declared political goal was to pursue a soft version of social democracy. He firmly rejected any ‘purely market-economical view of the good society’ (MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, note 3 above, pp 174–75). As a matter of political philosophy, he explicitly attacked voluntaristic liberalism of the social contract variety in favour of contextual individualism associated with the communitarian tradition (eg ibid, pp 162–63).

74 Ibid, p 152. Elusively, and all too briefly, he skirts over ‘whatever storm clouds now hover over the prospects for the single currency’ (ibid, p 155). MacCormick was far from the only one to succumb to what Majone later characterized as the ‘culture of total optimism’. Majone, G, Rethinking the Union of Europe Post-Crisis: Has Integration Gone Too Far? (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp 58–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty, note 3 above, ch 11.

76 Ibid, pp 145–49.

77 Ibid, p 149.

78 Loughlin, M, Political Jurisprudence (Oxford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar, ch 7.

79 See especially Scharpf, F, ‘The Asymmetry of European Integration: or Why Europe Can't Have a Social Market Economy’ (2010) 8 Socio-Economic Review 211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Laval v Svenska Byggnadsarbetareförbundet, C-341/05, EU:C:2007:809; International Transport Workers’ Federation and Finnish Seamen's Union v Viking Line, C-438/05, EU:C:2007:772. See eg Lasser, M, ‘Fundamentally Flawed’ (2014) 15 Theoretical Inquiries into Law 229Google Scholar.

81 See eg Streeck, W, Buying Time: Reflections on the Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Verso, 2014)Google Scholar.

82 See eg Scharpf, note 79 above. In fact, as Scharpf explains, the logic was already grasped by Hayek in the 1930's in his work on interstate federation.

83 See note 80 above.

84 MacCormick, note 1 above.

85 Beck, note 8 above. See also Bulmer, Simon and Paterson, William E., Germany and the European Union: Europe's Reluctant Hegemon? (Red Globe Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 On the image of the sleeping sovereign see Tuck, R, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.