Original scientific paper
A CONSTITUTION WITHOUT THE STATE AND THE PEOPLE (1)
Davor Rodin
; Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Looking at the European Constitution and the legal attainments of
the European Union from the perspective of the modern nation-state
leads to aporia and Euroskepticism since the European Union has
never been, nor will it ever be, a political community modelled after
the nation-state. The nation-state as a constitutional institution is not
tantamount to political processses; it is one of the historical options of
the political. The state and politics cannot be equated: the nation-state
is a political institution while politics is a process with various alternatives of institutionalization. These two sides, the constitutional
state and the political processes, are in the relationship of soft incommensurability and it is not quite possible to equate them in some higher association. Equating the constitutional state and the political activity in present-day debates on the European Constitution results in Euroskepticism. Conservative theoreticians of the state and politics cannot study the constitutional state separately from political processses.
For them Europe is possible solely as a constitutional state with democratic legitimation; otherwise it will never come into being.
These theoreticians view the relationship between the constitution
and politics as the means-ends or cause-effect category, and not as an open-ended process between two unequatable media that are semantically mutually irritating. The goal of the European politics is not a European state, nor is the goal of the European constitution to curb the spontaneity of European political processes. The European Union is an open-ended semantic relationship between its legal attainments and its political processes. Consequently, the concept of democracy as a political form will have to be redefined.
The European Union as a political community sui generis should
be explained from the perspective of contemporary theories evolved
along the lines of the linguistic and deconstructivist reversal of the
modern substantionalist rationalism, universalism and cosmopolitism.
The major contribution of these post-modern theories is that they do
not consider political reality as an objective given, but as a construct
for which we know how it was produced so that we can change it.
This means that the object of study is not the constitutional-legal reality but the knowledge of the constitutional-legal reality that is continuously expanded by means of the new designations of the semantically nonexistent political environment. The European Constitution and the European politics are in the relationship of mutual semantic irritation, but are not identical and will never become identical.
Keywords
European Constitution; European Union; nation-state; people; political processes; Euroskepticism; substantialistic rationalism; deconstruction; unequatable media; incommensurability; semantic irritation
Hrčak ID:
20978
URI
Publication date:
18.2.2006.
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