ABSTRACT
The traditions of natural law, natural rights and republican constitutionalism stand as central foundational elements of a conceptual architecture which frames global liberal order, international law and their morphing into a form of transnational neoliberal order. Liberal cosmopolitan global constitutionalism is seen as emerging via a process of reflexive development and gains its ‘legitimacy’ through the cosmopolitan discourse of human rights and ‘transnational norms’. The various strands that mutate and emerge from the ancient Mediterranean tradition of republican constitutional government extend and wind their way through the development of 20th- and 21st-century international law. Much of the growing body of academic work on ‘global constitutionalism’ represents a version of liberal cosmopolitanism which uses a constitutional language quite broadly to endorse a process of the expansion of transnational legal regulation that emerged in the mid-20th century and intensified from the 1990s onwards under neoliberal globalisation.
