An anonymous and rarely cited text, Fe política de un colombiano was consulted by the editors at the John Carter Brown Library, whose catalogue attributes it to Eloy Valenzuela (1756–1834), a Catholic priest from Santander, Colombia. However, it is highly unlikely that Valenzuela, who was close to Simón Bolívar at the time of publication, penned a pamphlet which appeared to be criticizing (though not in explicit terms) the Convención de Ocaña, convened by Bolívar to replace the existing 1821 Constitution. The main message of the Fe política was against the concentration of power in the executive, then perceived to be Bolívar’s purpose in convening the Ocaña Convention. On April 1, 1826, the Gaceta de Colombia registered its publication stating that “the author … was born in one of the departments of the antigua Venezuela.” Its author might have been Javier Francisco Yanes (1776–1846), particularly as in his Manual político del venezolano, Yanes used the Fe política without attribution, in a book that is seemingly generous in acknowledging the work of others. But if the Gaceta de Colombia was right, this would rule out Yanes’ authorship as he was not born in Venezuela but in Cuba.

This chapter explores Germany’s legal relationship with European integration, particularly the interplay between the German Constitutional Court (BVerfG) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ). It highlights the tension arising from the ECJ’s constitutional interpretation of European law and the role of the BVerfG in balancing constitutional requirements under the Basic Law. Predominant focus falls on the evolution of the Solange doctrine developed by the BVerfG, which conditionally accepts the ECJ’s primacy based on a theory of structural congruence - ensuring democratic accountability, rule of law, and rights protection in European governance comparable to Germany’s standards. The development of the structural congruence idea, how it came to inform the BVerfG, and its place in historical debates among German legal scholars all fall under the spotlight. It concludes that while the BVerfG has often admonished the ECJ, its critique aims to ensure a cohesive and democratic European constitutional order.

This book offers a selection of key texts mostly written by leading figures in the history of Spanish American political thought during the first century of independence. Political thinkers in the region had to grapple with rather unique and extraordinary circumstances after three centuries of Spanish colonial rule. The emergence of a significant number of new independent polities that adopted representative institutions in an era when absolutism still prevailed in Western Europe, their general adoption of republicanism (except for Mexico during the brief rule of Agustín de Iturbide in 1822–1823, and Maximilian in 1864–1867), and their complex demographic composition, all posed serious challenges for the formation and consolidation of national states in Spanish America. In dialogue with the major currents of thought in Western Europe and North America, Spanish American thinkers often reflected upon these and other related problems while being politically engaged, either in government or in opposition.

This chapter examines China’s evolving governance of international marriages through the lens of sovereign concerns, focusing on border stability, population management and national security. It explores how material and affective processes inform the regulations and representations of marriage migration to China. The discussion shows how the Chinese state continually revises its administrative and legal framework for international marriage, and also highlights the historical, racialised and gendered forces embedded in this process. The argument contends that the regulatory framework of marriage migration is shaped by shifting ‘structures of feeling’ that define belonging in Chinese society. These intersecting spheres of state affective and regulatory practices reveal new power dynamics and inequalities in China’s relations with the outside world.

The conclusion synthesises the book’s arguments, highlighting how marriage and migration serve as pivotal sites for examining the intersection of geopolitical and intimate projects. It reveals the complex relationship between national desire, family, marriage and race within China’s quest to realise the China Dream. The war in Ukraine further amplified these narratives, reinforcing the image of China as a rising force capable of stepping in where other nations falter. A relational approach to China’s interactions with the world, particularly through the lenses of gender and race, necessitates an exploration of the historical, geographical and normative dynamics that shape China’s self–other relations. Russia, in this context, serves as a critical node, connecting China to the racialised global order through its proximity, historical ties and shared geopolitical outlooks. The gendered and racialised dimensions of these processes highlight that national security and international relations are deeply intertwined with intimate relations.

The historical background to democracy, which good citizens must defend, started with the Greeks. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius thought that political history was circular, which meant that good regimes, ruling on behalf of the people, held sway for a time but deteriorated into bad regimes – tyrannical – ruling for the rulers’ benefit. Their solution was to propose “mixed regimes,” containing monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements which, checked and balanced, would have to cooperate with each other by compromising different interests. Such a regime was the Roman Republic, which promoted both compromise and public virtue (“republicanism”) in the sense of devotion toward the state. During the Enlightenment, European political thinkers added the concepts of “sovereignty,” in order to impose public order, and “social contracts,” to make sovereigns at least somewhat answerable to subjects. Thus when the Founders convened to invent their government, they used “common sense,” prescribed by Paine, Jefferson, Madison, and others, to fashion a mixed government of special character. That government, which the Founders called “republican,” rested on a written “constitution,” which reined in “factions” via “checks and balances,” and which refrained from creating a “sovereign” who might, as in the French case almost immediately, plunge the nation into war.

This chapter explores the intense debate over the proposed parliamentary union between Ireland and Britain in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion. It examines competing visions of representative government, with unionists advocating for Ireland’s integration into a larger British polity to secure stability and prosperity, while anti-unionists defended the autonomy of the Irish Parliament as a symbol of national liberty. Key themes include the clash over sovereignty, the role of Catholic emancipation in the union debate, and the economic implications of integration. The chapter also analyses the pamphlet war that erupted, revealing how public opinion was mobilized through arguments about political equality, economic benefits and sovereignty. Ultimately, the Union’s passage in 1801, marked by political manipulation and broken promises, set the stage for Ireland’s turbulent relationship with Britain in the nineteenth century, framing subsequent struggles over governance and representation.

Britain’s constitutional evolution falls within the mainstream of European constitutional traditions, but the gulf between its governing practices and those adopted in the European mainstream has grown progressively wider. While most European nation-states have adopted written constitutions at critical moments of modern history, Britain continues to adhere to the traditional conception of a constitution as a set of laws, customs and practices that continuously evolve in response to social, economic and political change. This is one reason why Britain’s involvement in the venture of creating a European Union has always been rather awkward. In this chapter, I sketch the main constitutional tropes that have emerged in British thought and show how they express a constitutional identity antithetical to the assumptions driving the project of continuing European integration. I first introduce a series of constitutional stories through which the English have sought to explain themselves as a nation and a state and then consider how these accounts have evolved with the expansion of the English state into a British imperial state. Finally, I will indicate how these legacies ensured that Britain could never become an active participant in the European federal project.

It has been said that countries in East-Central Europe have their own brand of constitutionalism which celebrates the idea of national sovereignty. I shall argue that, when the question of sovereignty is treated in the framework of cultural imaginaries, we realise that this region’s constitutionalism is actually much less archaic than it might seem. Despite all the diversity encountered in East-Central Europe, there is a recurring cultural theme running through it: the idea of being a small nation that has suffered great historical tragedies. Yet no political or legal position with respect to sovereignty follows from the mere observation that the nation is small and in need of protection. As the history of East-Central Europe shows, depending on the kind of threats that are thought to besiege the nation, state sovereignty may appear either as a protective shield or an obstacle precluding membership in some larger political community. Even supposing that countries in East-Central Europe share a collective mentality centred on the category of the nation, it does not follow that they should be especially attached to state sovereignty in any traditional sense.

From the medieval to the modern, King Arthur is habitually but not neccessarily associated with white male sovereignty authorised by violence against racially Othered peoples. Arthur is always raced but he is not essentially white. This chapter is interested in both the lacunae and the articulations of ‘race’ in Arthurian scholarship, and in what emerges when we pay attention to the racial Self as well as Others in medieval and modern Arthuriana. Situated in premodern critical race studies, and exploring African American Arthuriana in particular, the essay argues that paying attention to the embodiment of Arthur once again reveals the protean nature of race itself.

Abraham Lincoln's political writings were the works of a practical politician, not a political philosopher. Yet, his understanding of American politics was deeply informed by wide and penetrating reading in 19th century liberal political economy. This reading convinced him to be a determined opponent of slavery, and a vigorous promoter of henry clay's 'American system.' both of these programs retained their hold on Lincoln, and when, after his election to the presidency of the United States in 1860, the republic was plunged into civil war over slavery, Lincoln guided the nation toward the erasure of legalized slavery and to an economy favourable to commerce and manufacturing. His victory in the civil war, cut short by his assassination in 1865, nevertheless changed the political culture of the nation for the next sixty years, and set the country on the slow but inexorable path of civil equality for the freed slaves.

Anglophone Arthurian films (including television) continually restage the triumphant break from the medieval that serves as the constitutive myth of origin for modernity.  The divinely appointed absolute monarch (Arthur) returns, but only to figure a sovereignty invested in the people.  Medieval Arthurian narratives explore the nature and exercise of political authority, providing ideological legitimacy for political institutions and defining the individual’s obligations within those institutions.  This chapter examines how modern Anglophone film and television remediate Arthurian legends, projecting contemporary notions of sovereignty back onto the Middle Ages.

Various critics have labeled Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah as a dictator novel, a dictator-novel, or a novel about dictatorship, forcing the questions that inform this chapter: isn’t there a well-defined genre where Anthills fits unproblematically? Is the African novel that thematizes dictatorship a sub-genre, or the unwieldy name for the genre from which the African dictator novel emerges? Or are they co-existent genres? If genres “change when new topics are added to their repertoires” (Fowler 233), I explore the germinal novels of disillusionment in the 1960s, the imprecise “dictatorial literature” and “dictator” novel descriptors used in the early 1990s for clues that illuminate the difference between the dictator novel and novels about dictatorship. Playing off Derrida’s argument that the word “genre” establishes a “limit,” a line of demarcation (57) that simultaneously creates “an edgeless boundary of itself” (81), I argue that this indeterminacy fits the African novel variously labeled as the dictator novel or the novel about dictatorship, and the delimitation should be flexibly located in the “edgeless boundary” defined by the themes and function the novels serve. Further, the rise of increasingly authoritarian rulers globally lends currency to the African dictator novel in unmasking their rhetoric of dictatorship.

Chapter 1 is the theoretical basis for the rest of the book, fully outlining the regulatory mercantilist framework, its origins, distinctions from other modes of regulatory governance, and its characteristics. This chapter considers the approach of regulatory capitalism and how it has been the Commission’s approach to technology regulation until relatively recently, aligned with the idea of the regulatory state and the reliance on expert-led forms of self-regulation or regulatory networks as a means of achieving economic goals based on a logic of efficiency rather than one of security. It outlines the ideas of mercantilism and its core features, expanding on how regulatory mercantilism draws from these principles, representing a changed paradigm in technology regulation in which the logic is one of security, with security and economy being mutually constitutive policy objectives, motivated by concerns over external dependency and guaranteeing sovereignty. It highlights the more interventionist approach to regulation that is adopted within a regulatory mercantilist approach, the renewed emphasis on industrial policy, and the regulatory export of standards as global standards.

This chapter explores anti-utopian satire in bestselling British author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Like the anti-chivalric satire of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, the Discworld books celebrate pragmatism and local knowledge rather than political ideals. The Discworld is alive with vivid utopian impulses, however, the chapter argues that they frequently lack concrete detail. Pratchett is more concerned with constructing a colourful world of humour, heroism, and villainy. The Ankh-Morpork books reflect on the processes of historical change, accelerating a medieval city-state into liberal industrial modernity via an array of fantastically estranged forms. The city itself, however, fails to actualise into a utopian vision of the future. Rather, Pratchett’s fantasy series articulates a deep suspicion of the kind of political radicalism often associated with utopian thinking. Through a close reading of two books in the series, Night Watch (2002) and Making Money (2007), the chapter considers how Pratchett’s fantasy world laments structural violence whilst lampooning utopian remedies to such violence, such as democratic elections, trade unions, industrial action, or new kinds of post-capitalist value.