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What Is a Supranational Constitution? An Essay in International Relations Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Alec Stone
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Extract

Under the banner of “regime theory,” the study of international relations has experienced a massive if largely unacknowledged return to law, the study of the nature, scope, and relevance of norms international politics. Regime is shorthand for forms of institutionalized cooperation in the international system. The article provides one way to assess this movement. In part I, I develop an abstract conception of constitutions as bodies of metanorms, those higher order norms that govern how lower order norms are to be produced, applied, and interpreted. I then examine the extent to which international relations theory is equipped to recognize that some international regimes are constitutional in form (part II). In part III, I propose a means of situating all regime forms, from the most primitive to the full blown constitutional, along a continuum. The central claim is that the distinction made between international and domestic society, for the most part a matter of dogma in mainstream theory, is relative not absolute.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 56 , Issue 3: Special Issue on Public Law , Summer 1994 , pp. 441 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1994

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6. I am consciously seeking to distill an essentialist if abstract conception of constitution here and in the typology below.

7. Metanorms may be present in, and constitutive of, a wide range of “constitutionalized” social settings, such as universities, trade unions, major league baseball, corporations.

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37. Ibid., chap. 6.

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39. Why exactly regimes can never constitute solid enough “anchors” is unclear. In fact, the assertion is belied by multilateral regimes generally, and by the EC in particular (see below).

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