Reforming the United Kingdom Constitution: Law,Convention, Soft Law

The Governance of Britain Green Paper continues the programme of constitutional reform begun in 1997, and appears to reinforce the juridification of the UK's constitution. Nevertheless, several key reforms will be implemented not by legislation, but by creating new conventions. This article argues that such ‘declared’ conventions are best understood as a form of constitutional ‘soft law’, which attempt to influence constitutional behaviour rather than generating binding norms. Applying a regulatory analysis, it then argues that the case for a soft, rather than hard law approach to constitutional reform is weaker than its widespread use in the UK suggests. Finally, the article challenges the thesis that the political constitution is being replaced by a legal constitution, arguing that the government's attitude to constitutional reform still exhibits basic characteristics of political constitutionalism. Moreover, there is more to contemporary constitutional developments than a bipolar contest between political and legal constitutionalism.     

Transnational constitutionalism – conflicts-law constitutionalism – economic constitutionalism: the exemplary case of the European Union

Transnational constitutionalism is both a sociological given and a legal challenge. We observe the emergence of ever more legally framed transnational arrangements with ever more power and impact. Do such arrangements deserve to be called legitimate rule in Habermasian terms? Is it at all conceivable that the proprium of law can be defended against the rise of its informal competitors? This article opts for a third way that listens to neither the siren songs on law beyond the state nor to the defences of nation-state constitutionalism as the monopolist of legitimate rule. The proposed alternative suggests that transnational legal ordering of the European Union should build on its reconceptualization as a ‘three-dimensional conflicts law’ with a democracy-enhancing potential. This reconceptualization operationalizes the ‘united in diversity’ motto of the Draft Constitutional Treaty of 2004, preserves the essential accomplishments of Europe's constitutional democracies, provides for co-operative problem solving of transnational regulatory tasks, and retains supervisory powers over national and transnational arrangements of private governance.     

The economic constitution and the political constitution: seeking the common good in the post-national setting

In the post-national setting, the concept of the ‘economic constitution’ has been seen as design template and saviour; whether based on transactional certitude or founded on ordoliberal precepts, the economic constitution is assumed to legitimate economic integration across national borders in the absence of comprehensive political settlement. Nevertheless, recent tensions – not only within the European Union (EU) but also, more strikingly, within the World Trade Organization context – indicate the limits of economic constitutionalism. This article seeks to identify the roots of recent dysfunction within the history and theory of economic constitutionalism. It traces the evolution of an adjudicational economic constitutionalism and its place within the EU legal order, including the new EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and contrasts this vision with the more comprehensive and/or socialized models of economic constitutionalism found not only within the Weimar Republic but also within the post-revolutionary/post-conflict constitutional context. The article also places a major emphasis on theorizing around the apex of economic-constitutional thought, ordoliberalism, but concludes that no concept of the economic constitution can be seen in isolation from its social-political context, or from notions of the common good. To this exact degree, failures in modern economic constitutionalism may derive from a misplaced universalism – a technocratic absolutism that abdicates political responsibility for the common good, locating it instead in an ‘idolatry of the factual’ or a new naturalism of market inevitability.     

Political Constitutionalism and the European Union

What kind of constitution is emerging in Europe? There are two approaches to answering this question. The first, a ‘foundational’ approach, rejects the premise: there can be no real constitution in the absence of a ‘demos’, a foundation which exists only nationally. The second, ‘freestanding’ approach, depicts it as paradigmatic of a broader phenomenon of cosmopolitan constitutionalism, based on individual rights guaranteed through a transnational rule of law. Rejecting both for their failure to account for European constitutionalism as a historical process of polity‐building, a third approach, ‘political constitutionalism’, is proposed, capturing the dynamic quality of constitutionalisation in the EU. From this perspective, what is emerging in Europe is a constitution that reflects a common good (predominantly conceived in economic terms), albeit one which is legally, political and socially contested. It is by capturing this complex picture of the political formation of Europe that the constitutional question will be most fruitfully pursued.     

The Perils of ‘As If’ European Constitutionalism

This review article offers thoughts on Kaarlo Tuori's recent book, European Constitutionalism, and more particularly on what he calls the ‘disciplinary contest over the legal characterisation of the EU and its law’. As the book's title suggests, Tuori privileges the constitutional perspective in that contest, so much so—he freely admits—that his analysis ‘predetermine[s] how the EU and its law will be portrayed’. And therein also lies the book's main weakness. Tuori's predetermined ‘constitutional’ interpretation, like so much of the dominant legal discourse in the EU today, ultimately obscures the core contradiction in EU public law. National institutions are increasingly constrained in the exercise of their own constitutional authority but supranational institutions are unable to fill the void because Europeans refuse to endow them with the sine qua non of genuine constitutionalism: the autonomous capacity to mobilise fiscal and human resources in a compulsory fashion. The EU's lack of constitutional power in this robust sense derives from the absence of the necessary socio‐political underpinnings for genuine constitutional legitimacy—what we can call the power‐legitimacy nexus in EU public law. To borrow Tuori's own evocative phrase, the EU possesses at best a ‘parasitic legitimacy’ derived from the more robust constitutionalism of the Member States as well as from the positive connotations that using ‘constitutional’ terminology evokes regardless of its ultimate aptness. The result is an ‘as if’ constitutionalism, the core feature of which is an increasingly untenable principal‐agent inversion between the EU and the Member States, one with profound consequences for the democratic life of Europeans. The sustainability of integration over the long term depends on confronting these adverse features of ‘European constitutionalism’ directly, something that legal elites—whether EU judges, lawyers, or legal scholars—ignore at their peril.     

宪政基因概论——英美宪政生成路径的启示

宪政基因是具有历史传承性的 ,能够引起宪政产生并决定其性质与发展方向的基本的社会因素。英美宪政之所以能率先生成并成为其他国家的学习典范 ,一个至关重要的原因是英美社会中较早地生成了个人权利诉求、政治权力多元和法律至上的宪政基因。这些基因是宪政产生及发展的原始动力 ,体现为宪法中的人民主权、基本人权、分权与制衡以及法治等原则。缺乏宪政基因的东方国家 ,最重要的是在社会上有意识地移植和培养这种基因 ,否则即使制定了宪法 ,也未必能够很好地实施。     

Reconciling Constitutionalism with Power: Towards a Constitutional Nomos of Political Ordering

Drawing upon Hannah Arendt's and Carl Schmitt's theories on the relationship between nomos and boundary, this paper revisits how constitutionalism and political power are reconciled as constitutional ordering. It first analyzes constitutionalism in the light of political modernity. Indicating that political power grounded by constitutions is omnipotent, complementing and completing constitutionalism, the paper contends that an omnipotent constitutional ordering is anything but an unleashed Leviathan. It is argued that constitutional omnipotence is framed and thus constrained by a constitutional nomos, the matrix of which is a dual delimitation of boundaries, generational, and jurisdictional.     

Activism and Popular Constitutionalism in Contemporary Vietnam

Based on Chinese constitutional analysis, political science, and law and society studies, we argue that work extending the application of popular constitutionalism to authoritarian states applies in Vietnam, as popular constitutionalism targets sites relevant to constitutional reform. We contend that popular constitutionalism located in authoritarian states requires three factors: a tradition of activism, space for reformist and pragmatic dialogue targeting constitutional change, and the political need for legitimacy. This article analyses activism in Vietnam, focusing on the lodging of Petition 72 with the Constitutional Amendment Drafting Commission in 2013, and the resulting responses. We conclude that this activism was pivotal in advocating for new constitutional norms, evidencing popular constitutionalism in Vietnam. The long history of Vietnamese scholar activism, the relative space for governance debates, and the political need for legitimacy made this possible. We also note that popular constitutionalism faces constraints in authoritarian states, which may shape its trajectory.     

Constitutional Balance in the EU after the Euro‐Crisis

This article analyses how the European Union's response to the euro‐crisis has altered the constitutional balance upon which its stability is based. It argues that the stability and legitimacy of any political system requires the structural incorporation of individual and political self‐determination. In the context of the EU, this requirement is met through the idea of constitutional balance, with ‘substantive’, ‘institutional’ and ‘spatial’ dimensions. Analysing reforms to EU law and institutional structure in the wake of the crisis – such as the establishment of the ESM, the growing influence of the European Council and the creation of a stand‐alone Fiscal Compact – it is argued that recent reforms are likely to have a lasting impact on the ability of the EU to mediate conflicting interests in all three areas. By undermining its constitutional balance, the response to the crisis is likely to dampen the long‐term stability and legitimacy of the EU project.     

Constitutional Directives: Morally‐Committed Political Constitutionalism

About 37 state constitutions around the world feature non‐justiciable thick moral commitments (‘constitutional directives’). These directives typically oblige the state to redistribute income and wealth, guarantee social minimums, or forge a religious or secular identity for the state. They have largely been ignored in a constitutional scholarship defined by its obsession with the legitimacy of judicial review and hostility to constitutionalising thick moral commitments other than basic rights. This article presents constitutional directives as obligatory telic norms, addressed primarily to the political state, which constitutionalise thick moral objectives. Their full realisation—through increasingly sophisticated mechanisms designed to ensure their political enforcement—is deferred to a future date. They are weakly contrajudicative in that these duties are not directly enforced by courts. Functionally, they help shape the discourse over a state's constitutional identity, and regulate its political and judicial organs. Properly understood, they are a key tool to realise a morally‐committed conception of political constitutionalism.     

Constitutionalism,populism, and the imaginary of the authentic polity: a socio-legal analysis of European public spheres and constitutional demoicratization

The sociology of constitutionalism emphasizes the duality of constitutions as both power limitations and power enhancements. Following the socio-legal perspective, this article focuses on the constitutional imaginary of the public sphere and distinguishes it from the imaginary of the authentic polity, in which the constituent power of the people is protected against the corrupting effect of representative institutions and technocratic bodies. The promise of authenticity is behind the recent resurgence of populism and the constitution of what Zygmunt Bauman describes as ‘explosive communities’. The final part of the article focuses on the transnational politics and law of the European Union (EU) and discusses its possible responses to the imaginaries of constitutional populism – most notably, the emergence of European public spheres and demoicracy. Without the constitutional imaginaries of an anti-explosive transnational and democratically constituted community, further enhancement of the power of EU institutions will always lead to populist backlash at the national and local levels of its member states.     

European Constitutionalism and the Modern Social Imaginary

This article seeks to shed light on some of the problematic assumptions underpinning the contemporary debate over the constitutional identity of the European Union. The central claim put forward here is that the development of the European Union’s constitution is significantly constrained by what Charles Taylor has described as the modern social imaginary. The constraint operates at two levels. First, modern understandings of constitutionalism typically ignore or underemphasize its dynamic and historical characteristics and its relationship with the self-understanding of political subjects. Thus, modern constitutionalism fails to acknowledge the importance of historically conditioned assumptions involved in the formation of the identities of political subjects. In short, it fails to understand constitutionalism as a ‘regime’. Second, modern constitutionalism’s blind-spots result in a relatively unreflective adherence to a particular type of constitutional regime: the modern economy and its associated ‘consumerist’ form of political citizenship.     

Beyond ‘Constitutionalism Beyond the State’

For contemporary constitutional theory, the key challenge posed by globalization undermines the traditional link between constitutionalism and the state: in response to multi‐level governance, theories of constitutionalism beyond the state have been advanced. This focus on levels obscures more fundamental epistemological questions raised by globalization about the nature of constitutionalism itself. Critical analysis of three leading schools of constitutionalism beyond the state – supranational, societal, and new constitutionalism – highlights their shared assumptions with state‐based thought regarding the separation between economics and politics, and the necessarily hegemonic character of constitutionalism. However, globalization intensifies critique of these assumptions, and questions their translation to the transnational context. An alternative scholarly fault line to the state/non‐state cleavage emerges between working within and transcending the politics of constitutional knowledge produced during the nation‐state era. A broader globalization perspective reveals the extent to which such processes of constitutional rethinking are under way through developments in the global South.     

契约精神与宪政

契约精神是现代市场经济在观念形态上的集中表现,是市民社会新的政治理念的浓缩与集中表现。宪政是指国家依据一部充分体现现代政治文明的宪法进行治理,以实现一系列民主原则与制度为主要内容,以厉行法治为基本保证,以充分实现最广泛的人权为目的的一种政治制度。契约精神,与宪政具有内在的逻辑关系即契约精神是宪政思想的重要来源,源于契约精神的平等、自由因子是宪政的灵魂;契约精神为宪政秩序的构建提供了具体的制度范式;契约精神与宪政彼此互动,所产生的时代新精神,不断推动着宪政制度走向完善。     

宪法基本假设的探析

宪法应有基本假设。宪法的基本假设应从市民社会与政治国家的分离与互动发展中寻找。宪法的基本假设是市民社会是理性社会;政治国家是市民社会的工具;政治国家与市民社会间适用自然法则。宪法的基本假设奠定了宪法运行和宪法理论的基础。     

European Union Constitution-Making, Political Identity and Central European Reflections

Abstract: This article focuses on the European Union's constitution‐making efforts and their specific reflections in the Central European accession states. It analyses both the temporal and spatial dimensions of constitution‐making and addresses the problems of political identity related to ethnic divisions and civic demos. It starts by summarising the major arguments supporting the Union's constitution‐making project and emphasises the Union's symbolic power as a polity built on the principles of civil society and parliamentary democracy. The EU's official rejection of ethnically based political identity played an important symbolic role in post‐Communist constitutional and legal transformations in Central Europe in the 1990s. In the following part, the text analyses the temporal dimension of the EU's identity‐building and constitution‐making and emphasises its profoundly future‐oriented structure. The concept of identity as the ‘future in process’ is the only option of how to deal with the absence of the European demos. Furthermore, it initiates the politically much‐needed constitution‐making process. The following spatial analysis of this process emphasises positive aspects of the horizontal model of constitution‐making, its elements in the Convention's deliberation and their positive effect on the Central European accession states. The article concludes by understanding the emerging European identity as a multi‐level identity of civil political virtues surrounded by old loyalties and traditions, which supports the conversational model of liberal democratic politics, reflects the continent's heterogeneity and leads to the beneficial combination of universal principles and political realism.     

Eclipse of the Constitution {Europe Nouveau Siècle}

The Court of Justice of the European Union has come to adopt a peculiar mode of balancing, revolving around a set of ‘general principles of law’, which results in key social rights at the core of the postwar constitutional settlement no longer being sheltered from review by reference to supranational economic freedoms. It is submitted that this does not only imply a kind of ideological restyling of European law, as noted in the literature but, more fundamentally, the erosion of Europe's composite constitutional architecture (at once European and national) resulting from playing down social rights qua ‘constitutional essentials’. As the new jurisprudence ‘obscures’ Europe's constitutional constellation, it is submitted that the Court should rule under the constitution and not over it.     

宪政式制衡还是多边化制度下的均衡?——基于结构与功能关系的WTO动态分析模型

西方学者主张的宪政模式论将WTO治理结构与国家政体进行理论上的比拟,倾向于将其塑造成宪政体制。宪政模式论能否成立,关键在于对WTO立法体制及争端解决机制(DSM)性质的理解。WTO立法体制的核心功能是协调,现有实践表明它是一个多边体制;同时,其争端解决机制地位从属于立法,在实证层次,WTO治理结构并不支持DSM的司法性质,DSM不可能构成宪政体制应有的司法之维;因此,虽然WTO某些法律功能具有内国宪法的特征,但总体上其治理结构的性质还不足以构成一个自足的宪政体系,宪政论的制衡模式观点难以在WTO的实践中成立。     

The Politics of Rule of Law Reform: From Delegation to Autonomy

How can we understand the delegation of power and authority – for example, from a polity to an administrator - in a world of fragmented governance? In this paper, I introduce the practices of contemporary ‘rule of law’ and ‘governance’ reform, which reframe this question in politically powerful ways. These practices are increasingly important in development contexts, and beyond. Practitioners begin with the assumption that some sort of administration occurs in the development contexts in which they work. They then focus on how to convene a political community in which to embed – and potentially legitimate - that administration. They thereby reconfigure the question of delegation into one of autonomy – or managing the extent to and ways in which the administrative legal system self-produces. In doing so, I argue that contemporary rule of law practitioners wield constitutional power under the rubric of workaday administrative reform. At the same time, they efface their political accountability.     

宪法判断的正当化功能

对特定国家行为的合宪性作出具有法律效力的宪法判断,有助于实现基本权利的保障和法律体系的统一。除此之外,对国家行为的正当化也是宪法判断所能实现的一个重要功能。宪法是法律体系的正当性基础,通过对法律规范作出合宪判断,可以直接强化其宪法上的正当性,而即便是违宪判断,通过法律技术的运用和处理,也可以实现对特定法律规范或国家行为的正当化功能。