Samenvatting

This contribution seeks to explain our commitment to the ambition to establish constitutional government, given the fact that this ambition appears to be unsuccessful. As for the latter, it is argued that the constitutional ambition is unsuccessful in that it is based on the idea of legal closure, whereas the practice of constitutional decision-making shows a continuous failure to establish such closure. To explain why political communities are nevertheless drawn to the constitutional ambition, this contribution defends that the idea of the constution as a governing normative framework functions as a useful fiction. This fiction, so the argument goes, facilitates a certain kind of public debate that enables political communities to express their collective identity.