The third chapter of Invisible Fatherland reconstructs and analyzes the symbolic decisions of the Weimar National Assembly, including the adoption of the name Reich, the compromise over the national flag and colors, and fundamentally the revision of the state’s honorary practices. The chapter shows that the flag compromise emerged from both heated debates about the imperial past and impassioned protest against the Treaty of Versailles. The revised honorary practices, on the other hand, aimed to promote equality and inclusion by removing official traditions that had excluded workers and other marginalized groups from state recognition. The chapter argues that the assembly’s symbolic choices represented works of compromise that balanced national heritage and modern state design. These constitutional decisions set the stage for the creation of a cohesive and modern republican style under the Federal Art Custodian.

Corporate Power and the Politics of Change introduces the concept of “corporate governing” – the rising tendency of corporations to intervene in public life. It distinguishes between two core forms: corporate socioeconomic advocacy, where firms take public stances on contested issues, and government substitution, where they perform quasi-public functions in the face of political inaction. Through examples like Nike’s Kaepernick campaign, Disney’s clash with Florida over LGBTQ+ rights, Apple’s racial equity efforts, and Meta’s retreat, the Introduction shows how corporations increasingly shape public discourse and deliver policy-like outcomes. This expanding role has triggered backlash, raising concerns about democratic legitimacy, political polarization, and executive overreach. This chapter identifies the core legal and normative questions driving the inquiry, surveys the relevant literature, and presents the analytical framework that structures the book – providing a detailed roadmap for the chapters that follow.

Chapter 4 involves a focus on the legitimacy and effectiveness of proxy-style institutions for future generations. It sets out criteria for assessing the legitimacy of such institutions based on Klaus Dingwerth, Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, and Antto Vihma. Criteria for assessing the legitimacy of international tribunals are developed based on an extension of Bogdandy and Venzke’s work with the idea of accountability to the demos being extended to include future generations. A concept of ‘future legitimacy’ is introduced which involves assessing institutions in operation now from the perspective of future generations when climate change is predicted to be ravaging the planet. Criteria for effectiveness are elaborated involving the Paris Agreement goals, as well as an assessment of the promotion of intergenerational justice and the values of inclusiveness, solidarity and addressing vulnerability. Particular challenges in application of these criteria in the context of international law and related institutions which represent future generations are discussed.

Chapter 8 makes a preliminary assessment of the likely effectiveness of the proposed UN special envoy for future generations by examining this proposal through the lens of three frameworks. These frameworks are, firstly, the rationale or normative basis for such a proposal measured against the principles of intergenerational justice, solidarity and vulnerability set out in Chapter 3 of the book. Next, the special envoy proposal is evaluated in terms of its legitimacy and effectiveness using the criteria elaborated in Chapter 5 (inclusive representation, democratic control in the form of accountability and transparency, deliberation, source-based/input legitimacy in terms of expertise, legal legitimacy, tradition and discourse, substantial/output legitimacy in terms of effectiveness and equity). The possible functions of a special envoy are examined and recommendations are made as to what mandate the special envoy should have, applying the matrix of proxy functions elaborated earlier in this book, which involves breaking proxy representation down into its functions (representative, compliance, reform and norm entrepreneurial). Finally, an overarching framework is proposed for measuring the potential effectiveness of the special envoy which incorporates both frameworks – proxy representation functions and democratic legitimacy.

The constitutional review debate is highly abstract, often ignoring relevant procedural aspects, and defined by the unrepresentative case of the U.S. Supreme Court. This paper argues against a misleading generality and connects elements of a general critique with various forms of constitutional review. The fact that constitutional review cannot be justified by vague references to ‘rights’ or ‘reason’ raises two questions: Are there relevant differences in the justification (1) and decision-making procedures (2) of courts and legislatures? (1) The general assumption that courts lack democratic legitimacy ignores differences between courts with and without explicit constitutional review mandates. While insufficient to resolve the legitimacy question, such mandates necessitate focusing on a particular court rather than discussing constitutional review in general. (2) The relevance of procedural differences is often overlooked. Examples for this are the non-recognition of the difference between constitutional ‘settlements’ of rights cases by Congress and the Supreme Court, and the disregard for the political character of legal standards. Ultimately, an ambiguity between political, legal and moral constitutionalism becomes apparent. While the critique of constitutional review can be understood as a core topic of political constitutionalism, a community may well opt in favor of legal constitutionalism through its political organs.

This chapter delves into the concept of legitimacy and introduces the readers to key debates on regulatory legitimacy. The concept of legitimacy has been extensively studied by scholars from various academic disciplines, including political theory, legal theory, political science, sociology and management studies. The resulting body of scholarship has, however, tended to remain in disciplinary siloes, making the study of legitimacy difficult to navigate. Chapter 11 offers first an exploration of different legitimacy claims that justify why individuals recognize an authority and its rules as legitimate. The chapter then moves to regulatory legitimacy.

The “All Affected Interests Principle” (AAIP) and the related “All Subjected Principle” (ASP) articulate principles of political legitimacy that can serve as potent instruments for evaluating the legitimacy of non-state institutional orders. However, while both are useful for evaluating the legitimacy of already-existing institutional orders, many of most important democratic legitimacy failures of our age arise not only from the undemocratic character of already-constituted orders but also from the fact that in many key domains we lack any institutionalized capacity to address the urgent collective action problems we face. How can such institutions be established in a democratically legitimate way, as an exercise of democratic collective agency? The chapter takes a historicizing turn, arguing that AAIP and ASP creatively retrieve and reconstruct old ideas in the history of democratic thought, liberating them from the presupposition that they can only be actualized within the territorial boundaries of the state. It then argues that we can reconstruct the concept of constituent power as a form of democratic agency to show how democratically legitimate sites of binding collective decision beyond the state can come into being.

Chapter 1 examines India’s dominant technocratic paradigms of expertise in relation to the flurry of anti-intellectual movements in a global context that includes Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. While in many of these instances a distaste of intellectuals emerges from mass anti-elitism or religious anti-rationalism, anger against intellectuals also stems from wanting to replace the disconnected ‘eggheads’ with the pragmatic businessman and rational technocrat. Cultural commentators have made pronouncements of ‘the end of politics’ as the result of capitalist instrumentality and economic rationalism in a range of political contexts. Significantly, however, I urge readers not to diagnose a depoliticisation, or ‘disappearance’, of politics in everyday life. Rather, I determine that it is incumbent upon social scientists to pay attention to what Havelka (2016) calls hérrschaft: ideas about how political life is organised, and how possibilities of social, cultural, and political futures are reframed.

International secretariats have increasingly turned toward orchestration as a mode of governance. This chapter analyzes the normative dimensions associated with orchestration, such as democratic values related to participation, accountability, transparency, and deliberation. It argues that orchestration as an indirect mode of governance muddles who should be held accountable for which actions, to which set of standards, and which agents have the right to demand said accountability. Orchestrators need to ensure that their own actions, and those of intermediaries, are democratically legitimated by affected stakeholders. The chapter applies this argument to orchestration by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat. While previous research on orchestration of the UNFCCC has predominantly focused on effectiveness nonstate action, this chapter shows how and why nonstate climate action requires democratic legitimation. It concludes by discussing the intrinsic and instrumental importance of evaluating orchestration through a democratic legitimacy lens and the implications for international secretariats.

It is clear that, under customary international law, the state that has suffered an armed attack must request aid before other states can provide it with that aid in the exercise of collective self-defence. There are a range of factors that need to be considered that do (or, at least, may) have a bearing on the ‘validity’ of that request. This chapter analyses perhaps the most controversial of them: the question of who can issue a collective self-defence request. In so doing, it examines the view that only states can request aid in collective self-defence and, indeed, further asks whether the issuer of the request must be a UN member. The bulk of the chapter then examines how one identifies the de jure government of the state for the specific purpose of issuing a collective self-defence request. A traditional reference point for the recognition of governments in international law generally has been the effective control of territory. However, this is of minimal – if any – importance to the identification of the entity that can request aid in collective self-defence. Instead, other factors, such as democratic and constitutional legitimacy, are of greater importance.

The authors begin by observing that most obligations of international law are still regarded as ‘based’ on State consent. There are good reasons for this, especially from a democratic legitimacy perspective. Still, the principle of State consent, even in its qualified version of ‘democratic State’ consent, suffers from important shortcomings that call for correctives. The chapter starts by accounting for the democratic value of State consent in International Organizations (hereafter IOs) before addressing some of its democratic deficits. It then articulates several institutional proposals to correct or, at least, complement the role of equal State consent in the institution, the operation and the control of IOs. The authors develop a non-ideal normative argument for the latter’s political re-institution. That re-institution has to start with the replacement of the principle of equal State consent by that of equal public participation in IOs: this does not only avoid reducing State consent in IOs to State veto or refusal rights, but it also extends the personal scope of those participatory rights to other non-State public institutions.

Social Justice Education (SJE) has become the defining orientation of many educators and educational researchers, but is not without its detractors. Because of its overt political investments, SJE has been accused of brainwashing students and violating the terms of democratic legitimacy. In this chapter, I offer a philosophical defense of some SJE. Using Canada as an example and comprehensive liberalism as a framework, I argue that many practices that we wish to protect under the banner of SJE can be defended by appeal to the foundational values that are common to liberal democracies and find expression in contemporary legislation. I suggest five criteria for distinguishing between defensible and indefensible forms of political education, allowing that not all self-proclaimed SJE will be defensible, and some less progressive education will be. I conclude by anticipating two objections to this strategy.

When we use the term “amendment,” we are analogizing changes that happen outside the four corners of the text to the those that happen within it – and we know that the inside, textual ones happen through specified procedures that have a democratic component. The amendment idea thus suggests democratically legitimate change – a change carried out by the proper procedures, in recognizable ways. Moreover, the term “amendment” generally connotes legitimacy – not just a change, but a change made according to the rules and one that leaves the basic endeavor of democratic constitutionalism in place. If Congress or the president simply began violating the constitution, for instance, few would reach for the word “amendment” to describe what was happening. The idea of amendment also evokes something persistent and distinct from the constant tussle and fluctuations that characterizes ordinary politics. The author therefore proposes that when we talk about amending America’s unwritten Constitution, we are not typically thinking about evolution in our practices and understandings, but are trying to describe a special set of durable changes that we ought to regard as democratically legitimate.