The economic constitution and the political constitution: seeking the common good in the post-national setting

Abstract

In the post-national setting, the concept of the ‘economic constitution’ has been seen as design template and saviour; whether based on transactional certitude or founded on ordoliberal precepts, the economic constitution is assumed to legitimate economic integration across national borders in the absence of comprehensive political settlement. Nevertheless, recent tensions – not only within the European Union (EU) but also, more strikingly, within the World Trade Organization context – indicate the limits of economic constitutionalism. This article seeks to identify the roots of recent dysfunction within the history and theory of economic constitutionalism. It traces the evolution of an adjudicational economic constitutionalism and its place within the EU legal order, including the new EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and contrasts this vision with the more comprehensive and/or socialized models of economic constitutionalism found not only within the Weimar Republic but also within the post-revolutionary/post-conflict constitutional context. The article also places a major emphasis on theorizing around the apex of economic-constitutional thought, ordoliberalism, but concludes that no concept of the economic constitution can be seen in isolation from its social-political context, or from notions of the common good. To this exact degree, failures in modern economic constitutionalism may derive from a misplaced universalism – a technocratic absolutism that abdicates political responsibility for the common good, locating it instead in an ‘idolatry of the factual’ or a new naturalism of market inevitability.