Paul Linden-Retek - Böcker

At a time when the integration of the European Union's peoples through the rule of law is faltering, this book develops a critical theory of postnational constitutionalism. Today, widely held conceptions of EU law continue to mislead citizens about the nature of political identity, sovereignty, and agency. They lose sight of a critical idea on which post-nationalism depends-that constitutional self-authorship is narrative, and the polity is a subject whose identity, history, and legacy are still in formation. Absent this vision, EU law reproduces crises of legitimacy: the depoliticization of public life; emergency rule by executive decree; a collapse of solidarity; and the rise of nativist movements. The book diagnoses this impasse as the product of a problem familiar to modernity: reification--a process in which social and historical relationships are misattributed as timeless relations among things.Reification's shrinking of social dilemmas, moral principles, and political action to narrow perceptions of the present explains law's role in perpetuating crisis. But this diagnosis also points to a remedy. It suggests that to sustain the emancipatory potential of EU constitutionalism we must recover law's relationship to time. Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law proposes a temporally-attuned constitutional theory with principles of anti-reification, narrative interpretation, and non-sovereign agency at its centre. These principles reimagine essential domains of constitutional order: social integration, constitutional adjudication, and constituent power. Spanning various bodies of EU jurisprudence, the book devotes particular attention to migration and asylum--struggles where questions of solidarity, law, and belonging are most generative and acute.

This collection examines what ‘critical theory’ as a distinct intellectual tradition in social, political, and legal thought contributes to the study of EU law and to the future of the European project.Covering a broad range of substantive fields of EU law and the history of legal integration, including constitutional law, the design of monetary union and economic law, fiscal integration and taxation, labour law, fundamental rights and anti-discrimination law, gender equality, migration law and policy, data protection, and the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), the volume illustrates how a more rigorous engagement with critical theory helps to navigate the post-crisis European legal landscape. The contributors bring fresh, thoughtful, and innovative perspectives to EU law and theory, diagnosing the deep-seated challenges facing contemporary EU law and reimagining the emancipatory possibilities still available for it.