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 constitutionmaking 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-labor/"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 organized left, both old and new. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]