Ante las dificultades que presenta el camino que hace ya algún tiempo se decidió emprender en este país, un camino lúgubre en el que proliferan como hongos diversas reivindicaciones del derecho de autodeterminación, esto es, de la soberanía, por parte de distintos pueblos o naciones, se hace evidente la necesidad de reflexionar sobre el mismo concepto del poder soberano. En este texto se aborda tal problema desde tres perspectivas, fáctica, normativa y racional. Al mismo tiempo que se ponen de manifiesto (...) las insuficiencias de las dos primeras, se defiende una comprensión racional del poder soberano, que quizá podría contribuir a la disolución de los malos augurios que se ciernen sobre nuestro futuro. (shrink)

This paper does resemble a philosophical-juridical perspective that reflects on the possibility to reconstruct the constitutional democracy through a Hegelian focus. Its aim is to tackle the current crisis of our liberal democracy, as well as to determine its causes. These causes are not only found in a deficient praxis of its purposes, but fundamentally in an insufficient understanding of the principles of that type of democracy. At the end, this democracy, if we mind to deter its ruin, has to (...) last on the idea of universal will and its determination through the individual rights and liberties. In this context, political liberties obtain a key role, especially the right of political participation and the freedom of expression, whose final purpose lays in the construction of a rational political will. (shrink)

Particularly in his work Representative Government, J. S. Mill tries to shape the government of social order according to the rules that served as a pattern for the constitution of the literary salons and clubs of the 17 th and 18th centuries. On these rules the Enlightened legal-rational model of society was built, whose demands as well as its differences from reality are enormous. However, this model, which remained in existence, although often broken, during the 19 th and 20 th (...) centuries, does not seem able to survive, even as a regulative ideal. The characteristics that now define the society of the masses in which we live make the fundamentals of Mill’s theory totally inadequate for an understanding of that society. (shrink)

It is evident that the international order has been changed at the beginning of the twenty-first century after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Peace is the essential end of every constitutional democracy, internally -in the relationships that its members maintain among themselves-, as well as externally -those relations that a society sustains with others. The problem arises especially in the relation of constitutional democracies with other political regimes. Whereas Kant defended that the best means to achieve peace was the (...) expansion of the republican regime, Rawls’ defense of liberal democracy did not envisage its expansion. The relations of a constitutional democracy with other societies, whether democratic or not, necessarily require a limitation of sovereignty in their exercise abroad. However, the relations among different sovereigns remain underdeveloped, practically at the mercy of the good or bad will of each of them, without a praetor with the capacity to establish the universal will that should prevail in the relations among states. (shrink)