1. Liberal Constitutionalism & Imperatives of Empire.
- Author
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Mahmud, Tayyab
- Subjects
- *
CONSTITUTIONS , *CONSTITUTIONAL law , *TRIALS (Law) , *NATIONAL security - Abstract
Of late Empire has come out of the closet. The doctrine of preeminence and preemption proclaimed by the new National Security Strategy of the U.S., the Patriot Act adopted by the U.S. Congress, and the end-less world-wide 'War against Terrorism' proclaimed by Western powers have put into question the thus far taken for granted protections of liberal constitutions and the rule of law across the globe. As the project of global human rights and collective security appears yielding to reinvigorated imperial designs, it appears imperative that legal scholars explore the validity of universality claims of modern constitutionalism. This paper is a response to this imperative. A recent pronouncement of the Queen's Bench of the British High Court about the British colony of Diego Garcia (an Indian Ocean island leased to the U.S. for use as a military base) furnishes the point of departure for this project. The pronouncement of this court brings into sharp relief contradictions between liberal constitutionalism and imperatives of empire. Constitutional guarantees of British law were held not available to Diego Garcia on account of it being a colony. The recent pronouncements of the U.S. Circuit Court in the Gauntanamo cases (now before the Supreme Court) entail a parallel fracture in the constitutional order. The first part of the paper uses these cases as the vantage point to conduct a comparative study of the colonial question in American and British constitutional law. The working hypothesis is that the colonialism, saturated with issues of racial difference, has historically operated as, and continues to operate as, a governing exception to liberal constitutionalism. The second part of the paper turns to legal theory and examines whether it adequately takes the interface between colonialism and liberal constitutionalism into account. Here the working hypothesis is that Carl Schmitt's decisionist theory of constitutional exception, while providing a productive opening, needs to be modified to address the colonial fracture of liberal constitutionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2004