The Empires and Decolonization hub together with the History of Democracy group welcomes Signe Larsen (Copenhagen/Warwick) for ' Post-Imperial Unions: Federal, Transnational, and Regional Constitutionalism after Empires.’ With a comment from Richard Drayton (King’s).

Modern constitutionalism is often presumed to be bound to the nation-state. Even scholarship on transnational constitutionalism tends to treat it as an exceptional and novel phenomenon epitomised by the European Union (EU). In her current research project, Signe Rehling Larsen challenges this nation-state-centric view.

This project contends that the EU is a highly successful example of a post-imperial union, which was brought about by a widely forgotten global movement in the twentieth century that turned to federal, transnational, and regional constitutionalism as the solution to the decline and collapse of empires. The central hypothesis of this project is that if the EU is unique, it is not because it lacks historical parallels, but because it was the most enduring and institutionally robust outcome of a twentieth-century global movement of federal, transnational, and regional constitutionalism after empire. In addition to the EU, the project examines other post-imperial unions proposed and constituted during the interwar period and afterWorld War Two, including the Commonwealth, the French Union (Union française), the West Indies Federation, a number of African federations, the Community of the Realm under the Kingdom of Denmark (Rigsfællesskabet), and constitutional debates and reforms in British India. These post-imperial unions all emerged as constitutional responses to the challenges of imperial decline—either as mechanisms for stabilising empire or as frameworks for imagining a new world order after empire. Despite their historical significance, no systematic study has been conducted on this global movement of federal, transnational, and regional constitutionalism, which sought to constitute post-imperial unions as alternatives to both empire and the nation-state.

The research project sets out to conduct an ambitious comparative study of post-imperial unions, the constitutional movement that shaped them, their contemporary legacies, and the insights they offer for a global order increasingly characterised by geopolitics and great power rivalry.