Democratic Crisis and Global Constitutional Law

Abstract

Democratic Crisis and Global Constitutional Law explains the current weakness of democratic polities by examining antinomies in constitutional democracy and its theoretical foundations. This book argues that democracy is usually analysed in a theoretical lens that is not adequately sensitive to its historical origins. The author proposes a new sociological framework for understanding democracy and its constitutional preconditions, stressing the linkage between classical patterns of democratic citizenship and military processes and arguing that democratic stability at the national level relies on the formation of robust normative systems at the international level. On this basis, he argues that democracy is frequently exposed to crisis because the normative terms in which it is promoted and justified tend to simplify its nature. These terms create a legitimising space in which anti-democratic movements, typically with a populist emphasis, can take shape and flourish.

A constitutional reflector? Assessing societal and digital constitutionalism in Meta’s Oversight Board

“…152 In the regime-specific system of Meta's platform governance, the Oversight Board may be able to institutionalize the multiple interests of users from different regions vis-à-vis the transnational governance apparatus. Thus the Oversight Board gives way to what Thornhill considers the freestanding forms of reflexive politics in different transnational contextsin this case, in Meta Inc. 153 Therefore, institutionalizing the internal dissent within that system of governance perceives the categorically public character of its decisions over the coherent application of community standards and international human rights, the implementation of moderation systems through algorithmic inputs and the definitions of recommendation algorithms that mould what content users receive in their feeds. These are societal decisions that have public character despite not necessarily being tied to power politics in national political systems.…”

War in World Society: Towards a new order of global constitutionalism?

“…Moreover, the new autonomous world law did not make but enabled the finalisation of anticolonial national liberation (even if it did not get rid of post‐colonialism), and for the first time in history, the realisation of democracy defined as full participative inclusion of all social classes , all genders and sexual orientations , all nationalities, colours, races , etc. in ever more national states and regional organisations all over the globe, at least as law in the books (Thornhill, 2019, 2020: 153–202, 2021).…”

“…The three issues, and especially the last are due to very different paradigms of constitutionalism defined as the respective relations between politics and lawrelations fixed by law, changed by political action. In this paper, instead of an internal criticism of Kelly's book, I try and develop a blueprint of an alternative paradigm of an evolutionary sociology of constitutions (Brunkhorst, 2014;Thornhill, 2011Thornhill, , 2019Thornhill, , 2020Thornhill, , 2021 related to war in the present world society (1989-today) but including in particular an alternative reading of the long-term history of transnational constitutionalism which is now close to being destroyed once and forever -but with no alternative in national politics any longer (which does not mean that national politics still remains deadly important but has only the alternative to go global and post-national or to regress to bloody nationalism, auto-destructive fascism and anomia). The alternative paradigm is based on a different idea of law especially constitutional law.…”

Socio-Legal Agency in Late Modernity – Reappreciating the Relationship between Normativity and Sociology of Law*

“…2 Christopher Thornhill, in his most recent book, defending a ' global legal sociology ' , notes that A wide sociological reconstruction of the emergence of democracy and the formulation of democratic concepts is required both to clarify the actual nature of democracy, and to avert the tendency of democracy to collapse into populism. (Thornhill 2020) Jacques Commaille, in a recent review of French socio-legal studies (Commaille 2021), welcomes the shift from a sociology of law focusing on the activities of state agencies, to a sociology of law adopting a bottom-up approach, focusing on, and thereby valuing, the individual practices that actualise the law. Now the questions are to what extent can it be justifi ed for the sociology of law to contribute to normative debates on individual agency, and how it is advisable to do so.…”