Contesting a World Constitution? Anti Systemic Movements and Constitutional Forms in Ireland, 1848 2008
Recent accounts of constitutional development have emphasised commonalities among diverse constitutions in terms of the transnational migration of legal institutions and ideas. World systems analysis gives critical expression to this emergent intellectual trajectory. Since the late 18 th century, successive, international waves of constitution making have tended to correspond with decisive turning points in the contested formation of the historical capitalist world system. The present article attempts to think through the nature of this correspondence in the Irish context. Changes to the Irish constitution, I suggest, owed to certain local manifestations of anti systemic movements within the historical capitalist world system and to constitution makers' attempts to contain militarily, politically and ideologically these movements' democratic and egalitarian ideals and practices. Various configurations of the balance of power in Irish society between 'national' (core peripheral) and 'social' (capital labour/'other' forces crystallised in constitutional form. Thus far, conservative and nationalist constitutional projects have tended to either dominate or incorporate social democratic and radical ones, albeit a process continually contested at critical junctures by civil society and by the organised left, both old and new.