Legitimacy, sovereignty, solidarity and cosmopolitanism: On the recent work of Jürgen Habermas

TLDR: A Plea for the Constitutionalization of International Law as discussed by the authors is an extension of the problematic taken up in Zur Verfassung Europas: Ein Essay (2011), translated as The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, the lecture, ‘Democracy, Solidarity, and the European Crisis’ (2013) and the essay "A Political Constitution for a Pluralist World Society” (2008).

Abstract: I read this paper, ‘A Plea for the Constitutionalization of International Law’, as an extension of the problematic taken up in Zur Verfassung Europas: Ein Essay (2011), translated as The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, the lecture, ‘Democracy, Solidarity, and the European Crisis’ (2013) and the essay ‘A Political Constitution for a Pluralist World Society’ (2008). This paper on the constitutionalization of international law builds on ideas taken from these quite recent works and it achieves an elegant level of generalization that goes beyond them. The general context for the constitutionalization of international law has been the ‘juridification of international relations’ which began after the Second World War leading to a fundamental change in our understanding of state power, suggesting a potential transnationalization of democracy. What is new in Habermas’ position regarding both the problems of the European Union and the concept of world citizenship is the special use of the concept of mixed constituent power, pouvoir constituant mixte. Although this idea is as old as Emmanuel Sieyes and James Madison, Habermas gives it a new meaning. The idea is that the development of constitutional law within the EU represents the potential for a new stage in international law viewed from the perspective of an historical reconstruction, which was originally framed by Kant. In contrast to the Euro skeptics Habermas constructs ‘a convincing new narrative’ which will characterize the potential development of the EU as a new stage in the process of the constitutionalization of international law as we move from the national to the transnational or supranational level of democratic development.