Ming-Sung Kuo (University of Warwick School of Law) has posted Semantic Constitutionalism at the Fin De Siècle: What If Constitutional Ordering is Simply a Reflection of Constitutional Episteme? (Transnational Legal Theory, 2013 (Forthcoming)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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Facing the post-Cold War new 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 reminisces a semantic constitutionalism as his envisaged world order comprising ‘constitutional fragments’ is dis-embedded from political, discursive communities of self-determination. With functional autonomisation in the place of political self-determination, Teubner’s constitutional wonderland appears to be steeped in 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.