Geopolitics and (ir)relevance of constitutional law

The recent renewed interest in geopolitics in public debate can be considered a symptom of a crisis in the conception of the constitution as a set of rules whose enunciation is a relevant function in itself, in the sense that the dominant forces of the legal-political system perceive them as prescriptive and above all as having an autonomous consistency with respect to the solicitations and pressures of the facts they claim to regulate, in the awareness that the conditions of existence of the legal-political system itself depend on their effectiveness. The crisis of the science of law – which manifests itself in the fact that jurists no longer understand the object of their discipline as the identification of valid rules, but as knowledge of regulated facts – intuitively evokes theoretical perspectives attributable to geopolitics. The essay takes up some theories of the “indirizzo politico” and of the “costituzione materiale” that have attempted, on the one hand, through the awareness of the self-creative role of politics, to insert into legal discourse the Weberian lesson regarding the fungibility of the political aims of the State, and, on the other, through the elaboration of categories that allow the identification of norms (and not mere facts) from extra-textual elements, to preserve at the same time that autonomous consistency of the rules with respect to the regulated facts on which the very relevance of a normative framework of reference projected into the future depends: consistency that a geopolitical perspective of law would instead seem to totally deny.

Keywords: Geopolitics and Constitution, Political Directions, Material Constitution, Constitutional law methodology, Conflicted fraternity.

Ilenia Massa Pinto, Geopolitica e (ir)rilevanza del diritto costituzionale in "DIRITTO COSTITUZIONALE" 1/2025, pp 15-35, DOI: 10.3280/DC2025-001002