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Defending Sovereignty in the Name of Post-sovereignty: Liberal and “Illiberal” Constitutional Idioms in the EU

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Sovereignty in Conflict

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics ((PSEUP))

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Abstract

The European Union (EU) today faces a paradox: A legal doctrine proclaiming the end of state sovereignty is increasingly being used to defend national sovereignty. Indeed, since the early 1990s, a remarkable doctrine has made its way into European legal debates: Constitutional pluralism, originally describing and justifying, the EU as a system in which there is no sovereign. This doctrine has come to enjoy a growing popularity among EU lawyers and the European Court of Justice. Yet, more recently, it has been used notably in Hungary and Poland to attack the EU. To cast light on this paradox, this chapter will first propose a framework to investigate constitutional democracy as a language. It will then examine the different uses of the language of constitutional pluralism in the EU today, to illuminate how its liberal and illiberal uses offer different articulations of national, popular and state sovereignty. In so doing, the chapter questions the often taken-for-granted opposition between “sovereignists” and “supranationalists” in the EU.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany

    Hugo Canihac

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  1. Hugo Canihac
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Correspondence to Hugo Canihac .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Julia Rone

  2. Cevipol & Institut d’études européennes, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Nathalie Brack

  3. Cevipol & Institut d’études européennes, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Ramona Coman

  4. Cevipol & Institut d’études européennes, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Amandine Crespy

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Canihac, H. (2023). Defending Sovereignty in the Name of Post-sovereignty: Liberal and “Illiberal” Constitutional Idioms in the EU. In: Rone, J., Brack, N., Coman, R., Crespy, A. (eds) Sovereignty in Conflict. Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27729-0_5

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