Juridification by Constitution. National Sovereignty in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Europe

In its first research period (2014–2015), the Research project ReConFort focused on national sovereignty/constituent sovereignty as a key category of its overall research on communication dependencies of historic constitutions. The topos was not only used

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Abstract In its first research period (2014–2015), the Research project ReConFort focused on national sovereignty/constituent sovereignty as a key category of its overall research on communication dependencies of historic constitutions. The topos was not only used as a search item, but also as tertium comparationis. On a comparative overview, national sovereignty is used to explain a legal starting point of the constituting process (the so-called ‘big bang-argument’). All references to national sovereignty mark the process of juridification of sovereignty by means of the constitution, i.e. political legitimation is turned into legal legitimation. This is coincident with the normativity as goal of the modern constitutional concept arising out of the revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. The essay of the Principal Investigator examines the juridification of sovereignty in the French discourse around the works of Sieyès and the parliamentary prerevolution. In the debates around the Great Sejm the old aristocratic understanding of the Polish Nation as one of the noblemen is found to be powerful. The procedural openness of the May Constitution 1791 is explained as a reflex onto juridification of national sovereignty. National sovereignty in the Spanish Cádiz Constitution 1812 is connected to the anti-Napoleonic context of the constitutional process. The general and extraordinary Cortes’ claim to the constituent power by virtue of the recourse to national sovereignty cannot be understood as representing a Rousseauian national volonté générale. The natural origin of national sovereignty in the Cádiz’ liberal understanding is influenced by late scholastical concepts and combines the supralegal limitations for the royal government with the historical legitimisation of the Cádiz constitution by the old fundamental laws of the Monarchy (las antiguas leyes fundamentales de la Monarquía). The constituent sovereignty in the Norwegian Grunnloven May 1814 is in various aspects comparable with the Spanish case: the constitutional process was received as guarantee of national independence. The Moss Process into the Swedish Union under the Fundamental Law of the Norwegian Empire of November 4, 1814 demonstrates the Extraordinary Storting as Constituent Assembly and the monarchy as constituted power. The statement of the Christiana

U. Müßig (*) Advanced Grantee of the ERC, Chair of Civil Law, German and European Legal History, University of Passau, Passau, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; www.reconfort.eu © The Author(s) 2016 U. Müßig (ed.), Reconsidering Constitutional Formation I National Sovereignty, Studies in the History of Law and Justice 6, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42405-7_1

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Faculty of Law 1880 on the King’s veto with regard to constitutional amendments relies on the differentiation between constituent and constituted sovereignty by explaining why constitutional amendments cannot be left to either of the constituted powers – neither to an ordinary parliamentary assembly nor to the King alone. Th