Golem Seminar Series – Post-Imperial Unions: Constitutional Alternatives to Empire and Nation-State

What if the EU were not a historical anomaly, but part of a broader – now largely forgotten – global pattern?

This project introduces ‘post-imperial unions’ as a conceptual frame to bring under one lens a range of political and constitutional phenomena until now studied in isolation. These include the EU, the Commonwealth, l’Union française, the Soviet Union, Rigsfællesskabet, the West Indies Federation, federal constitutional schemes for Africa’s and British Raj’s post-imperial futures and interwar schemes to federalize the Chinese empire. Devised between WWI and the 1960s, these projects offered constitutional alternatives to nation-states in response to the transformation of the global order brought about by imperial decline. If the EU is an outlier, it is not because it lacks historical peers, but because it turned out to be one of the most lasting unions born of a once-global search for political associations beyond empire and nation-state.

Post-Imperial Unions will undertake the first global comparative study of the constitutional projects of post-imperial unions. The aim is not simply to reconstruct overlooked constitutional projects but to transform the way we think about constitutions and the types of political associations they can facilitate and bring about. Through comparative archival work in London, Cambridge, Oxford, Paris, Florence, Delhi and Kolkata, and interdisciplinary collaborations, the project will map the constitutional pattern, explore the constitutional ideas, and assess the constitutional implications of post-imperial unions. In doing so, Post-Imperial Unions contests the nation-state centred model of constitutions and seeks to build the foundations for novel way of conceptualising, studying and teaching constitutional law and theory. Beyond constitutional studies, Post-Imperial Unions advances global political thought by shedding light on the overlooked constitutional dimension of post-imperial projects beyond the nation-state.

Speaker: Signe Larsen (Warwick)

This seminar will operate on a first-come, first-served basis.