While constitutionalism appears to be a new buzzword in political, public and analytical Eurospeak, it is never quite clear whether there are any shared terms of reference in this debate in “Europe,” let alone on a worldwide scale. To sort out the different approaches and their analytical strengths and weaknesses, this article offers an overview of analytical choices that are likely to determine the type and outcome of discussions about the constitutional significance of the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights (hereafter: the Charter). (2) It juxtaposes the seemingly paradoxical parallel development of a widespread use of “constitutionalism,” and increasingly “constitutionalization,” on the one hand, and the theoretical and political divergence in its application, on the other.

Fritz Stern, who was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association in 1999, commenced his speech on that occasion by asking: “Why do German democracies have to be identified, limited as it were, by associating them with the names of cities: Weimar, Bonn, Berlin. All this does is to emphasize unwelcome discontinuity.” (1)

The following essay was written prior to the tragic events of September 11, 2001, in an effort to reflect on an aspect of international law\'s confrontation with violence, national identity, and adjudicated forms of justice. Since the attacks in the United States, numerous commentators have expressed the need to act within the rule of international law. This essay speculates on the meaning of that notion. It is neither prescriptive in terms of policy nor reformist in terms of doctrine. Rather, it is part of an ongoing effort to discern the aesthetic significance, if not the rationality, of international law.

In the first place, I should like to stress that the emphasis of my rather ambitious-sounding subtitle is on ‘speculation’, and not on ‘the future of international law’; for one, it is, at least at the time of writing, entirely speculative to think about the mid- and long-term consequences of the September 11 attacks, since, so far, the announced response to the attacks by the United States, the ‘West’ and the ‘civilised world’, has not yet happened. We are in a strange state of limbo, where everything seems possible, from secret James Bond-type operations to outright military attack of Afghanistan by the US and NATO troops, from civil war in Pakistan to biological —or even nuclear-counterattacks by the terrorist fold, from ‘business as (almost) usual’ to ‘the world is out of joint’. At such times, to speculate is not only all one can do, but it is, I believe, positively encouraged for those who professionally and/or passionately deal with the structure and meaning of social reality, as, inter alia, international legal academics do. Secondly, the emphasis is also on speculation because, evidently, it would be quite preposterous to pretend to set out, in a very brief comment written ‘out of the moment’, what all this will come to mean for so richly textured an academic discourse as international law. Yet international law and international lawyers are in everyone's mouth at this moment, and so it seems precisely apt to ‘speculate’ —and no more—, in rough sketch, about the consequences the events of September 11 and their political-military aftermath could have on the theory and practice of the ‘law of nations’.

Even though poverty and poverty-related deaths are still increasing worldwide, too little has been undertaken against them. The question addressed in this article is whether citizens in the industrial countries who are better off have a duty to mitigate or stop the misery of the poor; and if so, what kind of duty is it. One could assume that social human rights offer an adequate answer to this question but their content, justification and implementation are highly contested from a legal as well as philosophical point of view. Different approaches to justifying social human rights and corresponding obligations are discussed in this contribution, and it is argued that neither focussing solely on a concept of “negative” obligations nor on a concept of “positive” obligations is sufficient. Moreover, it is pointed out that it is not convincing to deny social rights the status of human rights on the grounds that they do not correspond to negative universal duties. Instead liberal rights as well as social rights are both correlated with “waves of duties,” “negative” and “positive.”