Three Constitutionalist Responses to Globalization

This essay describes and evaluates three paradigmatic constitutionalist responses to increased global interdependence and integration. In recent years in debates on globalization constitutionalism in general has created surprisingly high hopes and astonishingly deep anxieties: some have presented the constitutionalization of international law as a kind of last ‘realistic utopia’; others have been profoundly troubled precisely by the threat which international law and global governance supposedly pose to the project of constitutional self-government. A sober assessment of constitutionalism’s potential and limits in the circumstances of globalization – r another constitutionalist proposal – is what I seek to provide in this ch ather than apter. The three responses I have in mind all take constitutionalism seriously as a complex normative concept; they either seek to protect constitutionalism from whatever happens in the realm beyond the nation-state or argue, on the contrary, that constitutionalism needs to be extended in order to generate new normative constraints and capacities in the absence of statehood – both in the sense of protecting existing states from supranational non-state institutions, and of strengthening such institutions vis-à-vis states. I should stress that I am concerned here with normative ideals, not with what