ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the expansive notion of multilevel constitutionalism or multilevel constitutionalism senso lato. It explores the most basic questions of principle about the present and future of constitutionalism in an age of intense globalization of economic, cultural, political and legal circuits of power. Multilevel constitutionalism has both a narrow and a broad reference. It refers to a particular school of thinking about contemporary constitutional developments centred on the work of the German scholar Ingolf Pernice and his associates. This approach emerged in the mid to late 1990s in response to the dominant Staatsrecht tradition in German public law and as an alternative way of conceiving of constitutional authority in the face of the exponential growth of the supranational European Union. It was an approach that sparked significant interest both within and beyond the German context, resonating closely with the emerging intellectual and political project to endow the EU with a more or less formal constitutional status.
