The Cosmopolitan Constitution
An increasingly interconnected world gives rise to a new type of constitutional authority: the cosmopolitan constitution.
The cosmopolitan constitution is not a blueprint for the constitution beyond the nation state, let alone a constitution of the international community; rather, it stands for constitutional law that reaches out beyond its national limits.
The cosmopolitan constitution comes in two forms.
In its moderate form, it reflects normatively altered circumstances of constitutional authority, such as the transnational relevance of human rights, the de-nationalization of social membership and the pluralism of public (and hybrid private) authority. Consequently, cosmopolitan constitutional authority conceives of itself (1) as constrained by international human rights protection, (2) as firmly committed to combating discrimination on the ground of nationality, and (3) as embracing strategies for managing its interaction with other sites of authority (such as the United Nations).
In its radical form, the cosmopolitan constitution ratifies the demise of political authority, which has been traditionally vested in representative bodies. It makes political processes yield to various, and often informal, processes of policy co-ordination (e.g., the Bologna process) so long as there is no reason to fear that the elementary civil rights might be severely underprotected. Roughly speaking, it represents constitutional authority for an administered, post-legal world.
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