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Constitutional Identity as a Constructed Reality and a Restless Soul

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Monika Polzin

Abstract

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The notion of constitutional identity is a recent and enigmatic notion in constitutional law and theory. This Article demonstrates that constitutional identity—understood as a certain constitution-related self-identity of a nation or people—can be constructed from the text of a constitution, its interpretation and its application. However, constitutional identity is nothing more and nothing less than a constructed reality that can be regarded as a constitutional state's restless soul. It exists only as a constructed, simplified, imagined reality that will most likely also be contested and subject to change. Constitutional identity and the reliance on it in particular by national courts should therefore not be regarded as something sacred and absolute that can be compared to an imagined stable heart. Instead, constitutional identity should be treated with caution.

Type
Special Issue Constitutional Identity in the Age of Global Migration
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 18 , Issue 7: Special Issue: Constitutional Identity in the Age of Global Migration , 01 December 2017 , pp. 1595 - 1616
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by German Law Journal, Inc. 

References

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24 Constitution in the sense of the present article refers to those written or unwritten constitutional documents that establish a basic democratic and constitutional order.Google Scholar

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[Emphasis omitted.].Google Scholar

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As I conceive it in its broadest terms, the place and function of constitutional identity is determined by the need for dialectical mediation of existing, evolving, and projected conflicts and tensions between identity and difference – or, more precisely, identities and differences – that shape the dealings between self and other within the relevant polity committed to constitutional rule and favorably disposed toward the aims of constitutionalism. At its most abstract, constitutional identity figures in relation to the threshold decision of whether to pursue constitutionalism or to reject it altogether as would be the case in the context of a pure theocracy.Google Scholar

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38 Id. For Jacobsohn, constitutional disharmony is very important for developing this constitutional identity. See id. at 4, 13).Google Scholar

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First of all, I would like to mention that under Article 6(3) EU the European Union must respect the national identities of its Member States. This means that the Union cannot encroach on the constitutional order of a Member State, whether it is centralist or federal, and does not in principle have any influence on the division of competences within a Member State. The revision of that provision by the Treaty of Lisbon expressly mentions respect for the constitutional structures of the Member States by the Union.Google Scholar

For further confirmation, see Case C-51/15, Remondis v. Region Hannover, 2009 E.C.J. I-8127, para. 40.Google Scholar

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When constitutional language fails to offer an unequivocal directive for decision, the recourse of the judge is not always to look “outward” toward overarching principles of political morality. In an illumating array of cases, the acceptable way to resolve the disputes and to explain the results is to turn “inward” and reflect upon the legal culture in which the dispute is embedded. The way to understand this subcategory of decisions is to interpret them as expressions of the decision makers' constitutional identity.Google Scholar

See also Fletcher, George, Constitutional Identity, in: Constitutionalism, Identity, Difference and Legitimacy 223 (Michael Rosenfeld ed., 1994).Google Scholar

84 See Rosenfeld, Oxford Handbook, supra note 5, at 771.Google Scholar

85 For a view relying on this aspect, see Shapiro, Robert A., State Constitutional Law, 84 Va. L. Rev. 389, 455 (1998)Google Scholar

The community that matters, though, is not an actual preexisting community, but the aspirational community represented in the constitution. It is a community constituted by the political process of constitution-making, by democratic politics, not by blood or history. This view allows for a more heterogenous notion of constitutional identity, one that may well accord with the situation in the states of the United States. These states may have had little preexisting moral unity, and free migration …. Their population and their culture may well reflect great national or international diversity, Nevertheless, through their constitution, the people of the state give rise to a value structure.Google Scholar

86 For an opinion regarding the recent headscarf judgment of the German Constitutional Court, see also Uwe Volkmann, Dimensionen des Kopftuchstreits, JURA 1083, 1084 (2015).Google Scholar

87 For a view on this aspect, see Ackerman, Bruce, A Generation of Betrayal?, 65 Fordham L. Rev. 1519, 1519 (1996).Google Scholar

88 See Conseil Constitutionnel decision no. 2010-613 DC, Oct.7, 2010, Rec. 276.Google Scholar

89 The European Court of Human Rights accepted the burka ban due to a wide margin of appreciation accorded to France. See ECHR, S.A.S. v. France (App. No. 43835/11), paras. 153–59 (July 1, 2014).Google Scholar

90 Flechter, supra note 83, at 739.Google Scholar

91 See Bundesverfassungsgericht [BVerfG] [Federal Constitutional Court], Feb. 25, 1975, 39 BVerfGE 1, 36–37.Google Scholar

92 Flechter, supra note 83, at 738.Google Scholar

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94 J.H.H. Weiler, Federalism and Constitutionalism: Europe's Sonderweg, in The Federal Vision: Legitimacy and Levels of Governance in the US and the EU 54, 65 (Kalypso Nicolaidis & Robert Howse eds., 2001).Google Scholar

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96 Uwe Volkmann describes the decision as a demand for serenity. See Volkmann, supra note 86, at 1092.Google Scholar

97 See Bundesverfassungsgericht [BVerfG] [Federal Constitutional Court], Jan. 27, 2015, NJW, 1359, 1369–73 (Schluckebier, J. & Hermanns, J., dissenting).Google Scholar

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99 I am very grateful to the comments by Ruud Koopmans on this point.Google Scholar

100 For more detail, see supra Part C II.Google Scholar

101 See Orgad, supra note 22, 85–131, 234.Google Scholar

102 See Strumia & Kaushal, supra note 53.Google Scholar

103 For a recent opinion, see Bundesverfassungsgericht [BVerfG] [Federal Constitutional Court], Dec. 15, 2015, 140 BVerfGE 317 (Identity-control), para. 53–55.Google Scholar