Transnational constitutional pluralism, its promises and pitfalls

In today’s world society, constitutional theories converge in assigning an emerging role to legal forms of regulation not bound by national political systems and authorities. Several approaches try to grasp the diversity and multiplicity of layers, levels and stake-holders which constitute the post-national constellation of regulatory structures. One of the most prominent of these approaches is the idea of a transnational constitutional pluralism. This piece presents theframework of a plurality of transnational constitutional structures as conceived by authors like Gunther Teubner, among others, to critically address the possibility of a global constitutionalization of law based on post-democratic structures in different domains of social regulation. In the end, the piece argues that, although pluralist approaches offer an useful description of current relations between law and power on the transnational level, there are functional limits to the constitutional claim emerging from the pluralist approaches. Such limits are, most importantly, pluralist approaches' incapability of offering democratic mechanisms of legitimization for decision-making processes.