part vii • legal history and legal science • dag michalsen 344 normality in many Scandinavian states. Today there is an almost schizophrenic understanding of the rule of law, its Rechtsstaatlichkeit. Never has the rule of law been so morally and legally anchored in international human right law. Yet the war-on-terror politics of the past two decades is a source of collective anxiety about the ability of any constitution to function in a normal way without resorting to states of emergency.25 The contemporary debates on constitutions and codifications are of a highly complex character. The legal world is, as we know, both universalist and local – which is nothing more than any lawyer’s commonplace wisdom. The world consists of international legal regimes grounded in the world order ofWestern hegemony, yet the law is experienced in everyday life on a local level. This gigantic span is a specific quality of modern law, and it structures the debates about codifications and constitutions. We are all familiar with the debates since 1989 in Europe about the utopian project – or for some, the dystopian project – of a European civil code. The immense work carried out over the last two decades has increasingly coexisted with new critical assessments of the probability of such attempts succeeding. Debates between what we may call the particularists and integrationists of European private law have shown deepseated differences over whether it is feasible to organize such a European civil code, or whether the European cultural landscape can manage the leap into a more universalist private law. This has coincided with debates about the constitutionalismof theEU in which liberal visions of the rule of law have been criticized for not rising to the challenges of increased social and cultural differences. Whether the withdrawal of the most important common law land, theUK, will benefit the classical codification ideology of the civil law continent remains to be seen. The European Commission has now mothballed the civil code project, and only the general politics of EUcan determine its 25 See the important publication by Günter Frankenberg, Staatstechnik: Perspektiven auf Rechtsstaat und Ausnahmezustand (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010). The challenges ahead
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=