Reconsidering Constitutional Formation I National Sovereignty: A Comparative Analysis of the Juridification by Constitution

296 Pages·2016·3.69 MB·English

by  Ulrike Müßig (eds.)

Studies in the History of Law and Justice 6
Series Editors: Georges Martyn · Mortimer Sellers
Ulrike Müßig Editor
Reconsidering
Constitutional
Formation I
National Sovereignty
A Comparative Analysis of the
Juridification by Constitution
Studies in the History of Law and Justice
Volume 6
Series editors
Georges Martyn
University of Ghent , Gent , Belgium
Mortimer Sellers
University of Baltimore , Baltimore , Maryland, USA
Editorial Board
António Pedro Barbas Homem, Universidade de Lisboa
Emanuele Conte, Università degli Studi Roma Tre
Gigliola di Renzo Villata, Università degli Studi di Milano
Markus Dirk Dubber, University of Toronto
William Ewald, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Igor Filippov, Moscow State University
Amalia Kessler, Stanford University
Mia Korpiola, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Aniceto Masferrer, Universidad de Valencia
Yasutomo Morigiwa, Nagoya University Graduate School of Law
Ulrike Muessig, Universität Passau
Sylvain Soleil, Université de Rennes
James Q.Whitman, Yale Law School
The purpose of this book series is to publish high quality volumes on the history of
law and justice.
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the growth of the European universities and the i us commune, the French Revolution,
the American Revolution, and indeed all the great movements for national liberation
through law. The study of history gives scholars and reformers the models and cour-
age to question entrenched injustices, by demonstrating the contingency of law and
other social arrangements.
Yet legal history today fi nds itself diminished in the universities and legal
a cademy. Too often scholarship betrays no knowledge of what went before, or why
legal institutions took the shape they did. This series seeks to remedy that
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Studies in the History of Law and Justice will be theoretical and refl ective.
Volumes will address the history of law and justice from a critical and comparative
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Contributions to this series will come from scholars on every continent and in
every legal system. Volumes will promote international comparisons and dialogue.
The purpose will be to provide the next generation of lawyers with the models and
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The series includes monographs focusing on a specifi c topic, as well as collec-
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More information about this series at h ttp://www.springer.com/series/11794
Ulrike Müßig
Editor
Reconsidering Constitutional
Formation I National
Sovereignty
A Comparative Analysis of the Juridifi cation
by Constitution

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for
research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 339529.
R eConFort is a research project in the fi eld of legal history (ERC-AG-SH6 – ERC Advanced
Grant – The study of the human past).
The positions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily refl ect the offi cial opinion
of the ERC or the European Commission.
Editor
Ulrike Müßig
Advanced Grantee of the ERC
Chair of Civil Law
German and European Legal History
University of Passau
Passau , Germany

ISSN 2198-9842 ISSN 2198-9850 (electronic)
Studies in the History of Law and Justice
ISBN 978-3-319-42404-0 ISBN 978-3-319-42405-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42405-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950195
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Acknowledgements
T his volume reports on the fi rst research results of the ERC Advanced Grant
ReConFort, R e considering Con stitutional F o r ma t ion. The transdisciplinary project
deals with selected constitutional discourses in eighteenth and nineteenth century
Europe and focuses on the experimental ambiguity or indetermination of constitu-
tional texts with regard to state-organisational core elements. At the invitation of the
University of Macerata from 9 to 11 March 2015, the post docs and myself as prin-
cipal investigator presented the research results on national sovereignty. The essays
of this volume rely on the elaborated version of the papers given in Macerata. This
book wouldn’t have come into existence without the help of many I express my
warmest thanks here. I am particularly grateful to Luigi Lacché (Macerata) who
invited us for the spring conference 2015; to Brecht Deseure (Brussels), Giuseppe
Mecca (Macerata) and Anna Tarnowska (Torún) for their excellent commitment to
the project, to Shavana Musa (Manchester) for her native speaker’s correction of my
texts and to the doctoral students (Franziska Meyer, Passau; Joachim Kummer,
Berlin) for their support with sources and literature. My thanks also go to the organ-
isational masterminds of ReConFort Stefan Schmuck (Passau) and Elisabeth
Schneider (secretary at my chair) who gave much of their time to bring my ideas
into life.
Passau, July 2016 Ulrike Müßig
v

Contents
Juridification by Constitution. National Sovereignty in Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Century Europe .................................................................... 1
Ulrike Müßig
1 On ReConFort’s Research Programme in General ................................ 3
2 Method of Comparative Constitutional History .................................... 5
2.1 Targeted Sources of ReConFort .................................................... 5
2.2 Methodological Challenges: Finding the T ertia Comparationis ... 6
2.3 Constitutionalisation by Public Sphere ......................................... 7
2.3.1 Press Media as Roadster of Politicisation ......................... 7
2.3.2 Importance of Cross-Border News: The American
Revolution in the Polish Public Discourse ........................ 9
3 References to the National Sovereignty in the Historic Discourses
of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Europe ................................ 13
3.1 In General: The Nation’s Start as Singular State
Organisational Legal Point of Reference ...................................... 13
3.2 The Various Interpretations of National Sovereignty
in the Works of Sieyès .................................................................. 18
3.2.1 Anti-estate Societal Meaning of National Sovereignty ..... 19
3.2.2 Anti-monarchical Meaning of National Sovereignty ........ 20
3.2.3 The National Sovereignty as Idea or Principle
of an “ordre nouveau” ....................................................... 21
3.3 Openness of the Political Vocabulary of 1789 for
the Rankly Oriented Use of Nation by the French parlements ..... 27
3.4 The Nation in the Polish May-Constitution 1788 ......................... 29
3.4.1 Old Republicanism as an Integral Part of the
Juridification by Constitution............................................ 29
3.4.2 The Procedural Openness of May
Constitution as Reflex onto the Juridification
of National Sovereignty .................................................... 33
vii
viii Contents
3.5 National Sovereignty in the Cádiz Constitution 1812 .................. 35
3.5.1 Sovereignty of the Spanish Nation (n ación española ) ...... 35
3.5.2 Late Scholastic Concepts of the Transfer
of Sovereignty (t ranslatio imperii ) or the Nation
as Moral Entity (c uerpo moral ) in the Cádiz Debates ...... 41
3.5.3 The Natural Origin of National Sovereignty
as a Limitation for the Monarchical Sovereignty .............. 44
3.5.4 Primacy of the Cortes in the Constitution of Cádiz .......... 46
3.5.5 The Legitimisation of the Cádiz Constitution
by the Old Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom
( las antiguas leyes fundamentales de la Monarquía ) ....... 47
3.5.6 Struggle of the realistas for the Monarchical Principle .... 51
3.5.7 Contemporary Ambiguos Evaluation
of the Cádiz Constitution .................................................. 52
3.6 The Constituent Sovereignty in the Norwegian Grunnloven ........ 54
3.6.1 Eidsvoll Debates and the Norwegian
Grunnloven of May 17, 1814 ............................................ 55
3.6.2 Moss Process into the Swedish Union:
The Extraordinary S torting as Constituent Assembly
and the Fundamental Law of the Norwegian Empire
of November 4, 1814 ........................................................ 57
3.6.3 Relationship Between Monarch and Parliament
in the Norwegian G runnloven ........................................... 58
3.6.4 Monarchical Right to Veto on Constitutional
Amendments and the Smooth Transition
to the Parliamentary System ............................................. 61
3.7 The Lack of the Notion Sovereignty in the F rench Charte
Constitutionnelle 1814 .................................................................. 66
4 The Undecisiveness Between Popular and Monarchical
Sovereignty in the Constitutional Movement
After the French July Revolution 1830 .................................................. 67
4.1 The Constitutional Movement After the French
July Revolution 1830 .................................................................... 67
4.2 Belgian Constitution of 1831 ........................................................ 70
4.3 Parliamentarism in England .......................................................... 72
5 Octroi of the Statuto Albertino 1848 ..................................................... 74
5.1 The Octroi of the Piedmontese S tatuto Albertino
and the Lack of an Italian Parliamentary Assembly ..................... 74
5.2 Italian costituzione flessibile Under the S tatuto Albertino ........... 76
5.3 On the Extension of the Statuto Albertino 1848
to Italy 1860: From the Octroi to the Referenda ........................... 77
6 Improvised Parliamentarism in the Frankfurt National Assembly ........ 79
7 Summary and Outlook ........................................................................... 81
References .................................................................................................... 83
Contents ix
National Sovereignty in the Belgian Constitution of 1831.
On the Meaning(s) of Article 25 .................................................................... 93
Brecht Deseure
1 Introduction ............................................................................................ 94
2 Parliament Versus King .......................................................................... 96
2.1 Parliament as the Sole Representative of the Nation .................... 96
2.2 Congress as the Sole Constituting Power ..................................... 100
2.3 The Legitimacy of the Senate ....................................................... 106
2.4 Nation Versus King ....................................................................... 107
2.5 The Royal Veto and the National Will .......................................... 110
2.6 Republican Monarchism ............................................................... 113
2.7 The King-Magistrate ..................................................................... 118
2.8 The Constitutional Powers of the King ......................................... 121
3 National or Popular Sovereignty? .......................................................... 126
3.1 A False Opposition ....................................................................... 126
3.2 The Limitation of Political Participation ...................................... 131
4 Reception ............................................................................................... 134
4.1 The Contested Nature of Popular Sovereignty ............................. 134
4.2 Legal Order, Legitimate Representation
and Political Participation ............................................................. 139
5 Conclusions ............................................................................................ 146
6 Summaries (French & Dutch) ................................................................ 148
6.1 L a souveraineté de la Nation dans la Constitution
belge de 1831. Sur les significations de l’article 25 ..................... 148
6.2 N ationale soevereiniteit in de Belgische Grondwet van 1831.
Over de betekenis(sen) van artikel 25 ........................................... 150
References .................................................................................................... 152
The O mnipotence of Parliament in the Legitimisation
Process of ‘Representative Government’ under
the Albertine Statute (1848–1861) ................................................................. 159
Giuseppe Mecca
1 Parliament, Consensus and Public Opinion ........................................... 160
2 Between Lemmas and Culture ............................................................... 163
2.1 Constitution and Sovereignty Within the ‘C onsiglio
di Conferenza’ . Some Choices Between Political
Opportunity and Juridical Reasoning ............................................ 165
2.2 Culture, Foreign Models and Coeval Experiences ........................ 169
2.3 The Sovereign Power between Dictionaries,
Political Catechisms and Newspapers........................................... 176
2.3.1 Dictionaries ....................................................................... 177
2.3.2 Political Catechisms .......................................................... 178
2.3.3 Newspapers ....................................................................... 180