The habermasian reconstruction of the kantian project of constitutionalization of international law

Abstract

This paper is about the Habermasian critique to the Kantian project of constitutionalization of international law, reconstructed from the procedural perspective of law and deliberative democracy. Although Kant has taken an important step by modifying the understanding of international law from a right of states to a cosmopolitan right, and this has been institutionalized in international organizations and institutions, the simple extension of the constitutionalization of law to the scope of inter-state relations would no longer be enough to re-equate the current asymmetrical relationship between power and law in the international sphere which results from the US unilateral and military power politics and which in the name of an ethnocentric moralization replaces the law by ethos. For Habermas, the constitutionalization of international law would only have any chance in the current historical circumstances by reformulating Kantian concepts of world republic, national sovereignty, state law, nation, and citizen, as well as by changing in the world society structure, for example, the reform of the United Nations. In contrast, the Habermasian proposal of a transnational constitutional democracy would have the advantages of better defining the  course of the constitutionalization of international law and of being a more just and democratic global constitutional order.