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European Constitutional Politics and the Making of Collective Self-Images: Technocracy and Populism as a Consequence of Political De-Constitutionalization

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Imagining Europe

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology ((PSEPS))

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Abstract

The debate on European integration oscillates between a critique of an authoritarian economic integration through technocratic governance and the increasing angst of a nationalist and populist backlash. Both phenomena are connected not only because emerging forms of populist constitutionalism are a dangerous reaction to the flaws of the former. They are connected because Europe suffers under a structural problem of (de)constitutionalization that narrows the possibilities of social imagination. To make this argument I will give some steps back and enter the theoretical terrain of constitutional sociology and political philosophy with the help of two authors: Claude Lefort and Niklas Luhmann.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On how liberal theories on microeconomic behavior shape the understanding of political problems as consumer problems, see: Olsen (2016).

  2. 2.

    This is the phenomenon described by Machiavelli that came to be called the “Machiavellian Moment” by Pocock (Pocock 1975: 3:1–9; Marchart 2007: 99).

  3. 3.

    This is clear in early texts by Luhmann and in his writings until the beginning of the 1990s. After that, he seemed to be irritated by the reality of world peripheries, especially by Neves’ descriptions of constitutionalism in Brazil, where there is no sign that modern constitutionalism will be established in the same way as it did in Europe (Neves 1992, 2017).

  4. 4.

    This is more important than one may think, since there is a whole new tradition of constitutional theory that almost completely dismisses the political constitution as one of the conditions of modern functional differentiation. See, for example: Teubner (2004, 2012).

  5. 5.

    In my opinion, Laclau’s critique on Lefort misses the point exactly because Laclau explains society as made entirely by (politically conceived) subjects (Laclau 2005: 165–171). If everything that there is, are political subjects and their discursive articulations of society, there is always going to be a hegemony of one of these subjects. Including democracy is an hegemonial form imposed by one subject. So, there is no possibility of understanding democracy as a procedural constitutionalization of power. Democratic constitutionalism appears maybe as the result “bourgeois hegemony”.

  6. 6.

    Some authors, inspired mainly by Laclau (Laclau 2005: 117–124), argue that the logics of populism might be the only way to activate the popular dimension of representative democracy against authoritarian forms of populism. For them, since authoritarian populists activate a necessary and latent dimension of democratic constitutionalism (namely, popular sovereignty), it is almost impossible to confront them without also appealing to some form of populism.

  7. 7.

    The two cases were Van Gend & Loos v. Netherlands (1963), which made European law directly applied to the European citizens in concrete legal conflicts, and Costa v. ENEL (1964), which established the supremacy of European law in the face of national law regarding issues related to the process of economic integration.

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  1. Institute for Political Science, University of Brasilia, Brasília, Brazil

    Pablo Holmes

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Holmes, P. (2021). European Constitutional Politics and the Making of Collective Self-Images: Technocracy and Populism as a Consequence of Political De-Constitutionalization. In: Blokker, P. (eds) Imagining Europe . Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81369-7_9

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