This chapter analyses the nature of collective identity implicit in the notion of a political community. Taking the debate between Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt on the competing claims to priority of the legal-normative and the political as exemplary of influential and opposing positions in constitutional theory, it argues (against both) that collective identity is reflexive identity, that self-constitution is constitution both by (political) and of (legal-normative) a collective self, and that the paradoxical relation of constituent power and constitutional form — of democracy and legality — is in a certain sense specious. The chapter sets a frame for addressing the arguments of the papers that follow.

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This final chapter addresses the problem of the normativity of legal order and ordering: how ought boundaries to be set? And this means: what ought to be included, and what excluded, in response to a-legal behaviour? At issue, therefore, is a theory of normative responsiveness. The chapter outlines the contours of a single, but crucial feature thereof, namely a politics of a-legality which indirectly acknowledges, in the process of setting boundaries, that every legal collective has a blind spot in the form of normative claims that resist integration into the circle of reciprocity and mutual recognition, yet which the collective cannot simply shrug off as specious, other than at the price of falling prey to a petitio principii. Linking collective self-identification to a novel reinterpretation of the concept of collective self-restraint, the chapter develops an account of a politics of a-legality that takes leave of both particularism and universalism.

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This paper critically examines the prevailing assumption that legal boundaries are becoming irrelevant in postnationalism. While the boundaries of the nation-state are forfeiting some of their hold on human behaviour, postnational legal orders are simply not legal orders unless they can in some way draw the spatial, temporal, material and subjective boundaries that make it possible to qualify human behaviour as legal or illegal.This implies that re£exively constituted legal ordersŵ hether national or postnational^must be presented as legal unities. To the extent that boundaries are the necessary condition of national and postnational legal orders, and therewith of legal unity, they also spawn the possibility of political plurality, manifested in behaviour that resists the very distinction between legality and illegality, as drawn by an order of positive law: a-legality. Rather than signalling the demise of legal boundaries, postnationalism ushers in a novel way of dealing therewith^and with a-legality.