ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 offers a historical account of the treatment of diversity within the realms of liberal and liberal-democratic constitutionalism. The analysis shows that, along with the growing importance of democracy and pluralism in constitutional settings and international law, diversity has increasingly been taken into account and protected by various indirect and direct legal means. Equality, citizenship, and majority rule can be seen as the basic elements of the modern state, which was the privileged playing field of the theories of liberal constitutionalism. Liberal-democratic constitutionalism has, instead, increasingly considered diversity as a condition to be protected through various means, from non-discrimination to minority and indigenous rights’ law mechanisms.
