European constitutional imaginaries: a socio-legal perspective

Abstract Constitutional imaginaries are internal symbolic constructs of self-constituted positive law and politics which make it possible to imagine and describe functionally differentiated modern society as one polity and distinguish between legal and political legitimacies and illegitimacies in this polity. Imaginaries, therefore, are not limited by the unity of topos-ethnos-nomos and evolve in national as well as supranational and transnational constitutions. In the context of European constitutionalism, general imaginaries of the common market, universal rights and democratic power are thus accompanied by specific imaginaries of European integration through legal pluralism , administrative rationality of calculemus , economic imperium of prosperity and democratically mobilised non-state community . These imaginaries invite constitutional theorists to rethink the juridical concept of constitution and employ sociological and social theoretical perspectives of constitutionalism within and beyond the state. In their specific ways, these imaginaries, which obviously can be detected at national levels but play a particularly important role at transnational levels of European integration, represent the paradox of modern society constituting its unity as difference, yet preserving its imaginary capacity to describe such differentiation as unity. Like any other society, European society thus represents its collective self to itself only through the specific imaginaries spontaneously constituted by its different systems.