constitutional moment

The phrase constitutional moment was coined by Yale legal scholar Bruce Ackerman in his multi-volume work We the People (beginning in 1991) to describe rare episodes in which a polity's basic legal and political order is reshaped through mobilized popular politics rather than ordinary lawmaking. Ackerman's American examples were the Founding, Reconstruction, and the New Deal — moments when, in his view, sustained public deliberation produced a higher-law transformation that subsequent generations treated as binding even without formal Article V amendment.

In international relations and global governance scholarship, the term has been borrowed more loosely. Analysts use it to label junctures when foundational rules, institutions, or shared understandings of legitimate authority appear to shift. Commonly cited candidates include:

• The 1945 founding of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions.
• The end of the Cold War (1989–1991), when scholars such as Anne-Marie Slaughter and others spoke of an opening for a more rules-based liberal order.
• Debates over a "European constitutional moment" surrounding the 2002–2003 Convention on the Future of Europe chaired by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, which drafted the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (rejected in French and Dutch referendums in 2005).
• Post-crisis junctures such as the 2008–2009 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, where commentators argued — often prematurely — that multilateral governance was being refounded.

Critics caution that the label is frequently invoked aspirationally. Ackerman himself set a high bar: a genuine constitutional moment requires signaling, proposal, mobilized deliberation, and codification. In IR, where there is no global demos and no formal amendment procedure, the analogy is contested. Realists treat alleged constitutional moments as reflections of underlying power shifts, while constructivists emphasize the role of norm entrepreneurs and discursive contestation in locking in new rules.

For researchers, the term is most useful as a diagnostic question — is this really a foundational reordering, or ordinary politics dressed up? — rather than as a settled descriptor.