The shifting relationship between functionalism and global constitutionalism

This chapter provides an intellectual history of the shifting relationships between functionalism and global constitutionalism. During the inter-war and post-war years, functionalism and constitutionalism were commonly understood as competing strategies for advancing international cooperation. Over time, however, the term functionalism came to be associated with a methodology used to illuminate the purposes or functions of constitutional norms and structures. This version of functionalism is less a mode of organizing international cooperation than an analytic tool used to identify, analyze and critique different constitutional orders. More recently, functionalism has begun to be used in yet another sense, to describe a distinct form of ‘functional constitutionalism’, most developed in the European Union context, but potentially applicable to other post-national constitutional orders. The chapter thus provides a typology of shifting conceptualizations of ‘functionalism’, and therefore of the relationship between functionalism and constitutionalism. Moreover, the analysis provides a window into the trajectory over time of differing preoccupations of those who study constitutionalism beyond the state. Finally, the various iterations of the relationship between functionalism and constitutionalism can also be used as a set of separable but mutually reinforcing frames through which to approach many of the debates over global constitutionalism explored throughout this Handbook.