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

Introduction

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, become isolated from politics, and alienated from people in the West, and faced difficulties in taking root in other cultural backgrounds.

Problem Statement

The problem is that 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.

Proposed Solution

The solution is to develop the integrative function of the constitution. So far, all attempts, primarily constitutional patriotism, have failed. It requires nothing less than a new theory of constitutionalism (call it identity constitutionalism), which connects:

1. The philosophical tradition of intersubjectivity
2. Discursive theories of constitutionalism
3. Social-cognitive perspectives on identity construction

Hypothesis

I claim that such constitution-based collective identity is possible if the constitution becomes central to political discourse. This happens under three conditions:

1. If the constitution is perceived as authentic (constitutional authenticity)
2. It creates a shared-meaning space for communication by incorporating major sources of local and global morality (normative compatibility)
3. It motivates actors to prefer constitutional speech over nationalist and religious ones through an adversarial institutional setting (institutional adversariality)

Research Methodology

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
• Quantitative survey research