The nomos of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

Abstract

In what follows I aim to unpack some of these issues, focusing on how the movement engaged questions of space, belonging and identity by challenging the normative assumptions that structure everyday life in the territory. The movement posed, as Xi Xi’s story does, the question of what it means to belong in Hong Kong and who has the right to shape the city’s destiny. Whilst these questions are perhaps broader than the traditional cut and thrust of legal or constitutional analysis, without attention to the normative force of the spatial and cultural orderings that framed the movement our analysis of these events remains limited. My claim is that the great success of the movement was to temporarily rupture the background ordering of the city that we – as legal scholars – so often take for granted. This interruption of the existing normative order or nomos of the city re-posed the questions belonging and by paying due attention to the interruption that the movement enacted allows us to see its enduring significance for Hong Kong’s legal and political settlement. The argument proceeds by first setting out the shift that I propose to take: away from “law” and towards the “nomos”, a term that, as will become clear, opens our thinking to a broader and more dynamic sense of normative ordering than that afforded by a strictly legalistic lens. I then turn to two distinct senses of the “nomos” that I will discuss in relation to the Umbrella Movement. The first, inspired by the German jurist Carl Schmitt, foregrounds the normative force of spatial ordering and the second, inspired by sociologist Peter Berger and the legal theorist and historian Robert Cover, assesses the discursive dimension to normativity, stressing how shared normative commitments are central to the formation of community and a common identity. My claim is that, beyond raising technical, constitutional issues concerning voting rights, the Umbrella Movement’s interruption of the city’s existing spatio-normative distribution posed fundamental questions about the nature of identity and belonging in the territory that goes to the heart of its political significance.