Chairs
Mariella Kraus: mariellakraus@gmail.com
Gonzalo Andrés Ramírez Cleves: gonzalo.ramirez@externado.edu.co
José Antonio Sanz Moreno: jasanzmo@ucm.es
Germán Lozano Villegas: german.lozano@uexternado.edu.co

One hundred years after the controversy regarding the essence and value of democracy, or the question of who should be the Guardian of the Constitution—a debate protagonised by the most prominent jurists of the Weimar Republic and, possibly, of the entire 20th century—we face the 21st century with too many fears and similar interrogatives. As if that were not enough, across the globe—beginning with the United States—we face a devastating attack on the democratic form of government, as imperfect as humans themselves. However, our role as constitutionalists remains to engage in pedagogy and—in the face of dogmas, myths, or fictions; or against disinformation, deceit, and the most clamorous lies of so many leaders before their peoples—we must continue to defend the only political construction worth fighting for, seeking its best interpretation and development.

The clash between the two titans of Constitutional Law—Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and Hans Kelsen (1881-1973)—still speaks to us, providing a doctrinal base as antagonistic as it is indispensable for understanding, even today, the two faces of our area of knowledge:

• On the one hand, Politics and the Power of powers, with the absolute Sovereign and unlimited Constituent Power, from the decisionism of Carl Schmitt’s ‘pure democracy’.
• On the other, the Law and its Norm of norms or, beyond the ‘Pure Theory’, the basic function of the Constitution as a legal limit to political power, which Hans Kelsen taught us.

And, upon this tension between sovereignty (without limits) and constitutionalism (limits to Power, even that of the People in democracy), the distinction between popular dictatorship and democratic constitutionalism is reborn today:

• The first, with Schmitt as the original inspirer of the construction of the People-as-One from the radicalisation of the constituent paradox.
• The second, with Kelsen and his democracy in freedom based on tolerance, respect for human rights and minorities, and the plurality of ‘We, the People’.

From this standpoint, this working group has many questions it will seek to resolve:

• Must we continue to assume the tension between Power and Law, Sovereignty and Constitution, as irreducible?
• Can we continue to qualify democracy as liberal?
• Or must we postulate the overcoming of this tension to reconstruct its reality without so many dogmas, myths, fictions, and lies?

This group seeks new approaches and answers in the conceptual battle determining the course of the war between two forms of State fighting hand-to-hand: (constitutional) democracy and (populist) autocracy. In the context of Latin America, this tension manifests intensely: constituent processes in dispute, innovative constitutions, and recent authoritarian regressions show that the region is simultaneously a laboratory of democratic constitutionalism and a stage for constant threats to its validity.