Searching for Order in Chaos: A Pluralist Critique of Global Constitutionalism.

It is clear today that the problems faced by the international community are truly ‘global’ in scale and require collective action well beyond the level of the nation-state. As a result of this, many contemporary scholars have turned to the idea of global constitutionalism as a potential panacea to these global issues, seeking to extrapolate the benefits of the constitution into the international system in order to harness globalisations more beneficial qualities while ameliorating its more dangerous traits. This thesis will address these ‘global constitutionalist’ arguments with a particular focus on global pluralism. It will suggest that the ‘mainstream’ global constitutionalist arguments are likely to fail in their mission of attaining the benefits of constitutionalism at the international level for two key reasons. Firstly, the visions of global constitutionalism offered by these global constitutionalists tend to be ‘partial’ in nature and underplay the importance of constitutionalism as a holistic phenomenon comprised of a symbiosis of normative and empirical characteristics, which, if unbound, fail to legitimate and control government in the desired fashion. Secondly, such visions fail to sufficiently account for the specific nature of global legal pluralism, which is driven in part by processes of fragmentation, undermining the potentiality for any form of coherent global constitutionalism which could span the entirety of the international system. Nonetheless, in the face of these hurdles, it will be argued that the international system might still possess certain structural elements that can render a modest form of ‘constitutional pluralism’. Consequently, although critical of more utopian notions of global constitutionalism because of insufficient engagement with the full spectrum nature of ‘constitutionalism’ as well as insufficient engagement with global pluralism, this thesis will suggest that constitutionalism might still have value as a useful tool for evaluating and improving governance in the global sphere.