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

Abstract

Constitutional pluralism is a theory for the post-sovereign European state. This state-type can only be made sense of historically, emerging out of postwar European reconstruction through the repression of popular sovereignty and restraining of democracy associated with various forms of depoliticisation, including the project of European integration. It starts to become unsettled at Maastricht, just as Neil MacCormick lays the ground for its theoretical development with his Lecture, ‘Beyond the Sovereign State’. This unsettling evolves 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’? This is all missed in a constitutional pluralist literature that evades material issues of democracy and political economy.