10.1080/20403313.2022.2115260">
 

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

9-15-2022

Rights

In Copyright

Abstract

Reviewing The constitutional theory of the federation and the European Union, by Signe Rehling Larsen.

Crisis can obscure and confuse. The past decade’s tribulations of the European Union and its structures of governance have left theorists grappling to comprehend the precise terms of Europe’s political and constitutional transformation. But crisis also can occasion a return to first principles—often those forgotten or themselves obscured by political transformations—that clarify thinking about political form and might even illuminate the contours of crisis itself. This is what Signe Rehling Larsen has done in her remarkable book on federation and European Union. In what follows, I outline the claims of the book in more detail, focusing on its central theoretical concepts and their application to European integration and to the EU’s recent constitutional instability. I then explore three aspects of the book that I found particularly worthy of critical analysis: (1) the meaning of ‘political autonomy’ as the concept around which the federation’s origins and structure of authority turn and, specifically, autonomy’s relationship to functionalism; (2) whether the federation’s political and legal form is adequate to its ambitions of decentering state sovereignty; and (3) whether the contemporary crises of the European Union might have still more to teach us about reimagining federal theory and its distinctive political ‘mode of being’.

Publication Title

Jurisprudence

First Page

458

Last Page

474

Comments

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Required Text

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Jurisprudence on 15 September 2022, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20403313.2022.2115260.

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