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Cosmopolitan law and time: Toward a theory of constitutionalism and solidarity in transition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2015

PAUL P LINDEN-RETEK
PAUL P LINDEN-RETEK*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Yale University, Rosenkranz Hall, 115 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06520, USA
*
*Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article seeks to confront the contemporary condition in which cosmopolitan law – meant to resonate as something citizens across borders author and live together – instead is increasingly a source of detachment, confusion, and alienation. Taking the European Union’s twin crises of democratic legitimacy and social solidarity as its starting point, the article offers a critique of existing approaches to supranational constitutionalism that are insufficiently responsive to this disenchantment. The article’s purpose, in turn, is to present perspectives from philosophy and legal theory that might promisingly recast, in this new cosmopolitan frame, our thinking about law as a mode of social integration. Specifically, the article’s central claim is that time – as a seldom-examined, yet essential dimension of law – is closely linked to law’s cosmopolitan potential and, concurrently, to the motivational resources for cosmopolitan solidarity. It is through a sensitivity to time – our awareness of the past passing into the present in anticipation of a future – that citizens can meaningfully hold together cosmopolitan law’s dual, ostensibly divergent hopes: shared commitment and self-decentring plurality. Drawing on Seyla Benhabib’s ‘democratic iterations’ and its roots in the work of Jacques Derrida and Robert Cover, the article elaborates the following two concepts: ‘cosmopolitan promise-making’, a diachronic form of cosmopolitan political agency; and ‘cosmopolitan legal narrative’, a set of plural, evolving constitutional interpretations open to mutual engagement over time. These concepts, in temporalizing our understanding of political identity and constitutional law, together serve to underwrite a cosmopolitan legal order without also thinning solidarity’s social and democratic foundations. The article concludes with a critique of the contemporary role of European courts and a concrete vision for the cosmopolitan development of EU jurisprudence. Reinterpreting Article 4(2) TEU as the right to constitutional narrative, the article advances new modalities and normative aspirations for constitutional interpretation beyond the nation-state.

Keywords

constitutional lawcosmopolitanismdemocratic iterationsEuropean Uniontime
Type
Research Article
Information
Global Constitutionalism , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , July 2015 , pp. 157 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Václav Havel, Speech in the European Parliament, Strasbourg, 8 March 1994, <http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=projevy&val=221_aj_projevy.html&typ=HTML>, accessed 12 January 2015.

2 Ibid.

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12 Brunkhorst’s work, it must be noted, is an important exception. See Brunkhorst (n 5). Nevertheless, while his critiques of European integration are compelling, Brunkhorst’s articulation of a thicker strand of solidaristic thinking in the end departs little from a Habermasian discourse theory of law and constitutional patriotism.

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17 See J Habermas, ‘The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy’ (n 14).

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95 See, eg, Case C-333/13, Elisabeta Dano and Florin Dano v Jobcenter Leipzig [2014] ECLI:EU:C:2014:2358 (holding that EU law does not prohibit Member States from restricting the access of economically inactive EU migrants to certain non-contributory social benefits and that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights has no application in this context); see also Joined Cases C-95/99 to C-180/99, Khalil and others v Bundesanstalt fur Arbeit [2001] ECR I-7413 (interpreting restrictively Regulation 1408/71, on social security, in a case involving stateless persons and refugees); Case C-327/02, Lili Georgieva Panayotova and others v Minister voor Vreemdelingenzaken en Integratie [2004] I-11055 (interpreting restrictively the establishment provisions of the Europe Agreements).

96 See, eg, Case C-256/01, Allonby v Accrington and Rossendale College [2004] ECR I-873; Case C-320/00, Lawrence and others v Regent Office Care Ltd and others [2002] I-7325 (interpreting restrictively Article 141 TEU on non-discrimination in remuneration).

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112 Case C-391/09, Malgozata Runevič-Vardyn and Łukasz Paweł Wardyn v Vilniaus miesto savivaldybės administracija and others [2011] ECR I-03787.

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