Community Through Constitution. REsearching how CONstitutions Construct Identity and LEgitimacy in Europe and MENA

ongoing

Constitutionalism provides a shared-meaning space, in which the idea of rights has served to emancipate individuals. This rights-based constitutionalism is in decline. It has ossified, became isolated from politics, and alienated from people in the West and faced difficulties to take roots in other cultural backgrounds. The problem is that the rights-based constitutionalism is unable to foster collective identity due to its conceptual limitations. Populist movements (secular and religious alike) thrive on this failure and forge a collective identity around simplified and homogenized cultural characteristics, which trumps individual rights and leads to exclusion and social injustice. The solution is to develop the integrative function of the constitution. So far, all attempts, primarily constitutional patriotism, failed. It requires nothing less than a new theory of constitutionalism (call it identity constitutionalism), which connects the philosophical tradition of intersubjectivity, discursive theories of constitutionalism, and social-cognitive perspective on identity construction. I claim that such constitution-based collective identity is possible if constitution becomes central to political discourse. It happens under three conditions: (1) if constitution is perceived as authentic (constitutional authenticity), (2) creates a shared-meaning space for communication by incorporating major sources of local and global morality (normative compatibility) and (3) motivates actors to prefer constitutional speech over nationalist and religious ones through an adversarial institutional setting (institutional adversariality). To prove the hypothesis, I will research constitutions’ discursive centrality and the sense of community among citizens in four European (secular and Christian) and four Middle Eastern and North African (Islamic) countries through a hybrid methodology combining supervised computational analysis of political discourses and quantitative survey research.