Paths for Constitutional Thinking ‘Beyond the State’?

Abstract

AbstractIn this chapter I consider the role that the constitutional state has played in restricting our sense of the possibilities of constitutional thinking and I trace the connections between the modernist state and metaphysical thinking. In doing so I hope to suggest that constitutional thinking does not need to be tied to the ‘state’ and instead concerns the commitment to what I term ‘enduring truths’. These truths are enduring, I argue, precisely because they cannot be confined to any particular epoch of constitutional undertaking, whether we call it the ‘pre-state’, ‘state’ or ‘post-state’. To explore these issues I have taken the debate surrounding the mature example of a political community which is said to be ‘beyond constitutionalism’—the European Union. My argument is that it is irrelevant to tie the problem of the EU’s constitutional future to the legacy of the state or to abandon constitutionalism itself in favour of a prospective procedural administrative accountability. What is now required is a commitment to a constitutional possibility for the renewal of the enduring truths of constitutional life rather than a steadfast adherence to the conventional metaphysics of the constitutional state.