Semantic Constitutionalism at the Fin de Siècle

Abstract

Facing the post-Cold War situation, the underpinnings of our epistemic framework for constitutional ordering are being contested. Against this intellectual backdrop, Gunther Teubner's ‘societal constitutionalism’, which he elaborates in Constitutional Fragments: Societal Constitutionalism and Globalization, stands out from the numerous reworked conceptions of constitution, all of which aim to account for the new political and socio-economic world in the global era in constitutional terms. This essay aims to put Teubner's epistemic innovation in constitutional theory in perspective, suggesting that his version of global constitutionalism is reminiscent of a semantic constitutionalism as his envisaged world order comprising ‘constitutional fragments’ is disembedded from political, discursive communities of self-determination. With functional autonomisation in the place of political self-determination, I argue that Teubner's constitutional wonderland is plunged into an endless process of constitutionalisation without the constitution as we know it, raising the question of whether we can build a political ordering simply on a constitutional episteme.