Full Description
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How can the EU be made legitimate and sustainable through (constitutional) law - and what is the role of constitutional lawyers and their ideas in creating this "sense of legitimacy"? This book seeks to answer these questions through the concept of the "constitutional imaginary": sets of ideas and beliefs that motivate and justify the practice of government and collective self-rule. Constitutional imaginaries are as important as institutions and office- holders, as they provide political action with an overarching sense and purpose recognized as legitimate by those governed. Constitutional imaginaries are 'necessary fictions' that make political rule possible, and at the same time they are ideologies which hide from view various forms of domination.
European Constitutional Imaginaries deals with a variety of questions and is split into four parts to address: the first part explores in more detail various meanings of European constitutional imaginary, as seen by different disciplines: legal sociology, political and constitutional theory, and philosophy. The second part revisits the contribution of some key authors to the creation of European constitutional imaginaries, and the third part offers various new ways of thinking about European constitutionalism. The fourth and final part examines political economy behind various constitutional imaginaries.
Written by a balanced mix of well-established authors and newer talent, European Constitutional Imaginaries promises to open debates on European constitutionalism that are necessary to understanding Europe's present predicament and its various crises, all navigated through the medium of law.
Contents
1: Jan Komárek: European Constitutional Imaginaries: Utopias, ideologies and the other
Part 1: Constitutional Imaginaries of the Past, Present, and Future of Europe
2: Jiri Priban: European Constitutional Imaginaries: On pluralism, calculemus, imperium and communitas
3: Marco Dani and Agustín José Menéndez: European Constitutional Imagination: A whig interpretation of the process of european integration?
4: Signe Larsen: The European Union as 'Militant Democracy'?
5: Claudia Schrag Sternberg: Ideologies and Imaginaries of Legitimacy from the 1950s to Today: Trajectories of EU-Official Discourses Read Against Rosanvallon's Democratic Legitimacy
Part II: At The Origins of Constitutional Imaginary - The work of selected european constitutionalists revisited
6: Jan Komárek: Why Read The Transformation of Europe Today? On the Limits of a Liberal Constitutional Imaginary
7: Alexander Somek and Jakob Rendl: Messianism, Exodus, and the Empty Signifier of European Integration
8: Hugo Canihac: From Constitutional Pyramid to Constitutional Pluralism: The transformation of the european constitutional imaginary in context
9: Amnon Lev: The Imaginary and the Unconscious: Situating constitutional pluralism
Part III: Rethinking Constitutional Imaginaries for the Present
10: Peter L. Lindseth: The Constitutional Imaginary and the 'Metabolic' Realities of European Integration
11: Neil Walker: The European Public Good and European Public Goods
12: Kalypso Nicolaïdis: The Peoples Imagined: Constituting a Demoicratic European Polity
13: Paul Linden Retek: Constitutional Patriotism as Europe's Public Philosophy? On the Responsiveness of Post-national Law
Part IV: Without Political Economy: There can be no constitutional imaginary
14: Michael A Wilkinson: On the New German Ideology
15: Hjalte Lokdam: Beyond Neoliberal Federalism? The Ideological Shade of the Eurozone's Constitutional Order after the Eurozone Crisis
16: Jeffrey Miller and Fernanda Nicola: The Failure to Grapple with Racial Capitalism in European Constitutionalism
17: Damjan Kukovec: Constitutionalism and Powerlessness
18: Marija Bartl: Imaginaries of Progress as Constitutional Imaginaries
19: Jan Komárek: Conclusion: Making "the Other" Explicit
