Introduction: 'It is so very late that we may call it early by and by': Ferran Requejo

In a nocturnal scene, on seeing dawn's light entering the room where he is standing, one of the characters in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet exclaims: 'It is so very late that we may call it early by and by.' 1 Something similar could be said of the current situation of liberal democracies. Their theoretical health and undeniable practical success over the past two centuries do not hide, however, some of the conceptual and institutional shortcomings they display when faced with the 'new dawn' that some aspects of politics are experiencing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.