The achievements of the democratic constitutional order have long been associated with the sovereign nation-state. Civic nationalist assumptions hold that social solidarity and social plurality are compatible, offering a path to guarantees of individual rights, social justice, and tolerance for minority voices. Yet today, challenges to the liberal-democratic sovereign nation-state are proliferating on all levels, from multinational corporations and international institutions to populist nationalisms and revanchist ethnic and religious movements. Many critics see the nation-state itself as a tool of racial and economic exclusion and repression. What other options are available for managing pluralism, fostering self-government, furthering social justice, and defending equality?
In this interdisciplinary volume, a group of prominent international scholars considers alternative political formations to the nation-state and their ability to preserve and expand the achievements of democratic constitutionalism in the twenty-first century. The book considers four different principles of organization—federation, subsidiarity, status group legal pluralism, and transnational corporate autonomy—contrasts them with the unitary and centralized nation-state, and inquires into their capacity to deal with deep societal differences. In essays that examine empire, indigenous struggles, corporate institutions, forms of federalism, and the complexities of political secularism, anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists remind us that the sovereign nation-state is not inevitable and that multinational and federal states need not privilege a particular group. Forms of Pluralism and Democratic Constitutionalism helps us answer the crucial question of whether any of the alternatives might be better suited to core democratic principles.
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Forms of Pluralism and Democratic Constitutionalism, by Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen
- I. After Empire: Historical Alternatives
- 1. Federation, Confederation, Territorial State: Debating a Post-imperial Future in French West Africa, 1945-1960, by Fred Cooper
- 2. Decolonization and Postnational Democracy, by Gary Wilder
- 3. From the American System to Anglo-Saxon Union: Scientific Racism and Supra-Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century North America, by Joshua Simon
- 4. Constitutions and Forms of Pluralism in the Time of Conquest: The French Debates Over the Colonization of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s, by Emmanuelle Saada
- II. New Federal Formations and/or Subsidiarity
- 5. The Constitutional Identity of Indigenous Peoples in Canada: Status Groups or Federal Actors?, by Patrick Macklem
- 6. Federacy and the Kurds: Might This New Political Form Help Mitigate Hobbesian Conflicts in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria?, by Alfred Stepan and Jeff Miley
- 7. Europe-What’s Left: Towards a Progressive Pluralist Program for EU Reform, by Robert Howse
- 8. Subsidiarity and the Challenge to the Sovereign State, by Nadia Urbinati
- III. Status Group Legal Pluralism
- 9. Indian Secularism and Its Challenges, by Christophe Jaffrelot
- 10. Tainted Liberalism: Israel’s Millets, by Michael Karayanni
- 11. Jurisdictional Competition and Internal Reform in Muslim Family Law in Israel and Greece, by Yuksel Sezgin
- IV. The Challenge of Corporate Power
- 12. Corporate Legal Particularism, by Katharina Pistor
- 13. Tax Competition and the Unbundling of Sovereignty, by Tsilly Dagan
- 14. The Politics of Horizontal Inequality: Indigenous Opposition to Wind Energy Development in Mexico, by Courtney Jung
- Conclusion: Territorial Pluralism and Language Communities, by Astrid von Busekist
- List of Contributors
- Index
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