Reclaiming Constituent Power? Emerging Counter-Narratives of EU Constitutionalisation

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Peter Niesen; Dr. Markus Patberg
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 319145390

In a 12-months extension to our ongoing project, we propose to connect our developed model of constituent power in the European Union to questions of political agency. While our aim in the first 36 months has been to reconstructively identify a European ‘pouvoir constituant’, the next step will reflect on our model’s applications in constitutional politics. This will, first, result in the completion of a book manuscript under contract with Oxford University Press. We will add four constructive chapters to the completed heuristic and taxonomical chapters. The monograph will put forward for the first time a comprehensive theory of higher-level constituent power for federated polities. Second, we seek to confront our theory with its major empirical and normative challenge, i.e. disintegration tendencies such as Brexit, where constituent power has been activated and exercised in ‘sovereignty referenda’. Such developments highlight the fact that the allocation of constituent power in federations such as the EU is inherently unstable, which makes it both vulnerable to changes and invests it with innovative potential. We will address the democratic legitimacy of attempts at disintegrating existing polities by analysing and evaluating the conditions of shifting or newly emerging constituent power(s) in two peer-reviewed journal articles.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Netherlands
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Ben Crum