RICERCA ITALIANA     

Constitutional cosmopolitism and juridical-political dimension of the fundamental liberties in the Euro-mediterranean area

Università degli Studi di Teramo

Abstract

The present research program intends to evaluate the theory of constitutional cosmopolitism in consideration of the recent democratisation processes as well as of the development of fundamental rights in the Euro-mediterranean Countries. The project – divided in two steps – takes origins from a necessary preamble, examined by scholars of political history (unit of the University of Camerino), regarding the constitutionalism tradition, its propagation in the Western Countries, and those ideological roots merged into the Declarations of Rights realized during the bourgeois revolutions which still represent the ideal basis of the constitutionalism and of the fundamental rights.
The research will therefore analyse the actual trends of the Constitutional State Model, especially regarding its extension to Countries previously alien to the constitutionalism tradition, in order to evaluate the functionality of this model as well as of the basic fundamental rights structures in the Euro-mediterranean Countries recently affected by democratisation processes. It will also analyse the aspects of the democratisation processes in the Euro-mediterranean area, in order to put under evidence the various aspects of the different local forms of constitutionalism in this region. In this analysis the unit of University of Teramo will also stress the different forms of relationships among individual subjects, intermediate groups and public powers into these juridical systems; the research >>>

Principal Investigator

Francesco RIMOLI Università degli Studi di TERAMO

Research Objectives

The aim of the present research project is to verify the reliability of the constitutional cosmopolitism in the Euro-mediterranean Countries.

It is possible to identify six different middle-term goals:
1. The cosmopolitan approach is a typical aspect of the constitutionalism, at least from the beginning of the big bourgeois Revolutions, that fixed its basic principles from a juridical perspective; the universality of human rights is in fact affirmed from 1789 on, and since always represented a stable principle of the western juridical heritage, although hardly maintained in certain periods.
A first goal of the research project is to analyse the philosophical and political roots that concurred to define this form of internationalism of human rights. This goal represents a premise for the development of the research: it will in fact put under evidence how juridical cultures based on ideas of laicism and distinction between political and moral areas different from the ones produced by the western culture during the modern age could assimilate the fundamental rights tradition and its theoretical premises, like the individualism.

2. The Constitutional State until its actual structures had very different and often hard developments. Nevertheless, its conceptual model seems to be very homogeneous and compulsoriness, also because of the homogeneous cultural environments where this model took place. The continuing differentiation of the >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

Since years there is a debate about the new universalism of fundamental rights, that mainly regarded the expansion capability of the Constitutional State, connected to the generalization of a common heritage of fundamental rights. This scientific debate showed a strong multidisciplinary approach. From a philosophical view, we must remember the contribution of Jurgen Habermas, who revived the cosmopolitician right tradition of Kant and stressed the transformations of the universalism of rights in the "post-national constellation". Following this point of view, the more recent studies on human rights and citizenship faced the cosmopolitism as an attempt to offer a constitutional solution to the often deregulated phenomenon of globalization. The growth of a global market and the bigger circulation of goods and ideas posed questions about the traditional form of the national State, and therefore about the citizenship rights and liberties. Regarding this last aspect, Italian authors like Zolo and Costa analysed the diffusion and articulation of the citizenship.
Under the point of view of Constitutional Rights studies, we remember the works by Peter Haeberle, that focused on concepts like "cooperative constitutional State", "open society of the interprets of the Constitution", "global image of the constitutional State" and, in a specifically European perspective, "common European constitutional law". The most recent study about the dimension of rights in the scenario of the >>>