Between Balibar and Habermas: Toward a New Notion of ‘Constitution’

This thesis reconstructs and adjudicates debate between Jürgen Habermas and Étienne Balibar at the turn of the 21st century over the future of constitutional democracy in Europe, situating it within the structural transformations of the state and economy that define the postwar and financialized eras. It argues that Habermas’s project of postnational constitutionalism and Balibar’s theory of transnational citizenship together illuminate both the promise and limits of democratic theory when confronted with the deterritorialization of sovereignty under global capitalism. Habermas conceives European integration as the necessary political response to the globalization of markets, seeking to preserve the co-originality of law and democracy by scaling the constitutional framework beyond the nation-state. Balibar, by contrast, rejects this premise: for him, the economy is not an external constraint upon democracy but its constitutive condition. He redefines democratization as a struggle over the material and symbolic boundaries through which political membership and economic inclusion are organized. By reading these projects in light of contemporary financialization, the thesis extends Habermas’s co-originality thesis to include the mutual constitution of democracy, law, and the economy into the perpetual struggle between popular sovereignty and the rule of law that lies at the heart of constitutional theories of democracy. It argues that in the age of global finance, the allocation of credit, the management of debt, and the design of monetary and fiscal institutions function as de facto constitutional acts that determine membership, risk, and futurity. A renewed constitutionalism must therefore democratize finance itself -- transforming not only law but the constitutional forums of credit, debt, and bailout as arenas of collective authorship. The resulting framework envisions a constitutional democracy capable of enabling and adjudicating contestation over the very boundaries of the political and economic order, as well as the moral norms and conceptions of justice on which it founds and re-founds itself over time.