From 19. – 21. September 2016 the Mid-Term Conference of ReConFort was hosted at the University of Passau and at the premises of the Siemens Foundation in Munich. The topic of the conference was “On the Way to Juridifcation by Constitution – Sovereignty Issues in Constitutional History”. Besides the research team, the conference was attended by the International Advisory Board and visiting researchers from Australia, Belgium, Italy and Poland. In addition, the lectures had also been open to advanced students.
On Monday, the participants were welcomed by the President of the University of Passau Prof. Fr. Carola Jungwirth and the Dean of the Faculty of Law Prof. Dr. Hans Georg Dederer. The first day of the conference included talks by Dr. Stefan Huygebaert (Research Foundation Flanders, BE), Dr. Brecht Deseure (ReConFort, BE), Dr. Giuseppe Mecca (ReConFort, IT), Matteo Zamboni (Mailand, IT), Prof. Dr. Raf Geenens and Nora Timmermans (both Leuven, BE). The final talk of the day was given by the Principal Investigator of the ReConFort project Prof. Dr. Ulrike Müßig. In the evening, the participants were welcomed by the Major of the Baroque city Schärding (AT) Franz Angerer and received a historic guided tour around the city by Mario Puhane.
On Tuesday, the lectures continued with presentations by Dr. Florian Muß (Judge AG Oldenburg in Holstein, DE), Dr. Ania Tarnowska (ReConFort, PL), Dr. Marcin Byczyk (ReConFort, PL), Joachim Kummer, Franziska Meyer (both ReConFort, DE), Valerie von Poten (Student at the University of Passau) and Marius Müller (Student Assistant, Chair of Prof. Müßig, DE). Before the final talk of Dr. Bodie Ashton (Adelaide, AU), Armin Gerl (ReConFort, Chair of Prof. Kosch, DE) introduced the audience to the upcoming ReConFort Open Access Database.
On Wednesday, the last day of the conference, the participants headed to Nymphenburg Castle in Munich and received a guided tour around the Nymphenburg gardens by Marius Müller, focusing on architecture as form of constitutional communication. After lunch, all participants were welcomed at the premises of the Siemens Foundation. As instrumental introduction Barbara Blumenstingl and Prof. Dr. Ulrike Müßig presented different transverse flute pieces before the finals talks of the conference were given by Dr. John Allison (Fellow of Queens’ College Cambridge) – “The Westminster Parliament’s Formal Sovereignty in Britain and Europe from a Historical Perspective” and Prof. Dr. Luigi Lacchè (Rector of the University of Macerata and Member of the ReConFort Advisory Board) – “The Sovereignty Dispute in a European Perspective. Force, Reason or Constitution”.
The conference ended with a reception hosted by the Siemens foundation, providing the possibility for further talks and discussion on the topics of the last days.
Laura R. Rathmanner has published a Conference Report in the "Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht" wich can be found here: https://elibrary.verlagoesterreich.at/article/99.105005/zoer201702039501
The next ReConFort conference will be held at Toruń, Poland in February 2018.
The latest version of the Programm of the ReConFort Mid-Term Conference can be downloaded here:
Keynote of the PI (Constitutional Instrumentalisation of Ancient Rights. From ‘Golden Liberty’ to ‘Golden Age’) and contributions of ReConFort team members to the 4th ESCLH Conference 2016 in Gdańsk-Gdynia Culture, Identity and Legal Instrumentalism, 28 June till 1 July 2016.
Dealing with communication dependencies of historic constitutions the Research project ReConFort reconsiders the national constitutional discourses of the 19th century. The discovered sources confirm that it is the normativity which is the novelty of the modern constitutional concept arisen out of the American and the French Revolutions at the end of the 18th century. Neither governmental legitimation nor legal binding of political authority were new terms compared to the old constitutional semantics. Also the subordination of legislative assemblies remains on the traditional ground of the specific importance of fundamental laws which were higher‑ranking than ordinary laws.
It was the break with the English mother country that required a new legal fixture of the (whole) political order. Constitution now connotes a legal text, fixing the political order into a legal order: ‘the basis and foundation of government’, in the initiating wording of the Virginia Bill of Rights of June 12, 1776. The normativity is expressed by the positivation in one unified constitutional text. The textual seclusiveness stands for the differentiation between constitutional law and ordinary legislature. The old constitutional semantics knew particularly important, fundamental laws, but not the idea of a unified law, which is a gauge for the legitimacy of all other law and which the American resistance against Westminster produced 1776. This happened in the American effort to justify the revolution as legitimate breach of law. The taxation of the colonies by Westminster Parliament without the consent of the inhabitants (Sugar Act 1764; Stamp Act 1765) was 'unconstitutional', while the resistance of the colonies was considered ‘constitutional’.
Central consequence of the new normativity is the precedence of the constitution, which was the topic of the ReConFort-conference at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, March 14, 2016. The precedence of constitution is next to the topoi national/constitutional sovereignty, accountability of politics and the judiciary as constituted power one of the key categories, which structures the archival work of the international post-doc group and the ongoing interdisciplinary development of the open access database.
The forthcoming Springer-volume (Studies in the History of Law and Justice) explains national sovereignty as cross-borderly used legal starting point of the constituting process. All references to national sovereignty mark the process of juridification of sovereignty by means of the constitution. In the Polish May Constitution 1791 national sovereignty formulates a compromise between the old aristocratic noblemen’ privileges and liberal ideas of representation. National sovereignty in the Spanish Cádiz Constitution 1812 is connected to the anti-Napoleonic context of the constitutional process. The general and extraordinary Cortes’ claim to the constituent power by virtue of the recourse to national sovereignty is influenced by late scholastical concepts and combines the supralegal limitations for the royal government with the historical legitimization of the Cádiz constitution by the old fundamental laws of the Monarchy. The revolutionary overcoming of the French Charte Constitutionelle 1814 in the July Revolution 1830 led to a European-wide constitutional movement, whose connection with national struggles for freedom, invigorated the people and its representation as constitutional factors.
Unlike the French model the Constitution of Belgium 1831 was not negotiated with the monarch, but freely proclaimed by a national congress in its own right. In the octroi of the Piedmontese Statuto Albertino 1848, the constituent act of granting the fundamental law was communicated to rationalize the old royal sacredness of the absolute monarchy and was meant to avoid any scope for the differentiation between pouvoir constituant and pouvoir constitué. The improvised parliamentarism in the constitutional debates of the Frankfurt National Assembly 1848/49 corresponded with the openness of the “Sovereignty of the Nation” whereby Heinrich von Gagern inaugurated the Paulskirchen-assembly. This avowal to the singular and unlimited pouvoir constituant of a not existant German nation could not make sense as a programmatic claim to self-government, but reflected the indecisiveness of the European post-kantian liberalism between monarchical and popular sovereignty.
Presentations by the Rt Hon Lord Robert Reed (UK Supreme Court London) and Prof. Gerald Stourzh (Vienna) were followed by the joint lecture of the principal investigator Prof. Ulrike Müssig (ReConFort/Passau) and Dr. Shavana Musa (ReConFort/Manchester). The comparative context of the history of precedence of constitution as a keystone of modern constitutionalism was enriched by the papers of Dr. Frederik Dhondt (Brussels/Ghent-FWO), Dr. Sebastiaan Vandenbogaerde (Ghent), Prof. Eirik Holmøyvik (Bergen): and Prof. Thomas Olechowski (Vienna). The conference was moderated by Prof. Dirk Heirbaut and Prof. Dave De ruysscher in front of an international audience.
During the days that followed, the ReConFort team continued its internal discussion upon the invitation of the Bavarian Research Alliance at the premises of the DLR and the Leibnitz Association. The work in progress - presentations by Dr. Brecht Deseure, Joachim Kummer, Dr. Giuseppe Mecca, Franziska Meyer and Dr. Ania Tarnowska - focused on the precedence of constitution on the historic developments of the targeted countries.
On 16th March,, the team members of ReConFort took a guided tour in the European Parliament and met the MEP Dr. Angelika Niebler for lunch. She was introduced to the central points of the research project. She consequently emphasized the importance of the project for the current European integration process.
In the afternoon, ReConFort visited the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique as one of its cooperating partners in the creation of a digitalized open access database. The head of the digitalization department, Frédéric Lemmers, welcomed the team, discussed the challenges of digital humanities and outlined the cornerstones of the cooperation.
On 17th March, the ReConFort team was hosted at the Bavarian Representation in Brussels. For the evening the team visited the event ‘Stability & Solidarity: Europe's Fragile Balance in the Mirror of Research’ organized by the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
The team will meet again for the mid-term summer meeting in Passau and Munich, September 2016. The next annual meeting abroad will be in Torun (Poland) in 2017.
