People, Sovereignty and Citizenship constitutional concepts in light of their political goals to claim legitimacy in the international arena. What makes this redefinition possible is the fact that ‘the people’ is an abstract term that lacks canonical meaning. 10 As Shaw mentions in her introductory chapter, the concept of the people could refer to at least six different sets of ideas that have emerged historically and politically. 11 Yet I would add that we can further differentiate between the so-called constitutionalist and populist understandings of ‘the people’. In constitutionalist concepts, the common denominator is that the notion of ‘the people’ serves as a criterion to judge whether the totality of citizens and voters is a legitimate source of authority. 12 In this scheme, the ‘people’ are those who are the subjects of legal rights and obligations; that is, who fall under the scope of the acts adopted by parliament, and who bear the consequences of political decisions. By contrast, ethnonational populists speak of the people as a political power that is located outside the legal order and that, as such, cannot be limited by law. This group is fully formed before the adoption of a constitution and independent of the constitutional order or the creation of the state. Usually, it is an ethnic community that the populists perceive as a naturally given, living and willing entity that is based on genetic affiliation and has existed since time immemorial. Ethnonational populists speak of the people as a homogeneous group within the population who recognise themselves and are recognised as being on the friend side in the Schmittian sense. In order to form such a homogeneous group, populists fabricate citizens out of thin air and exclude others. This mechanism is well-illustrated by the case of Hungary where a ‘people’ was construed through an invocation of trans-border co-ethnics and, in parallel, an exclusion of refugees and ethnic minorities. 13 Thus, the ethnonational populist version of the people is ‘people-as-a-part’ instead of ‘people-as-a-whole’. 14 This type of population understanding has consequences for the meaning of popular sovereignty. In the constitutionalist tradition, sovereignty is understood in a legal sense, and popular sovereignty is ‘sleeping’, 15 or ‘dormant’ 16 after the constitutional framework is created, and the constitutional state is functioning. Ethnonational populists, however, perceive popular sovereignty as national sovereignty, and they understand national sovereignty as the sovereignty of the ‘people-as-a-part’. For them, the ‘will of the people-as-a-part’ is always above legal and even constitutional rules and procedures. For instance, the 2011 constitution of the Hungarian Orbán regime — officially named the ‘Fundamental Law of Hungary’ — invokes the mythical concept of the nation instead of the people as the originator of the constitution. This nation includes ethnic Hungarians living beyond the state, even without an effective link to it, but there is no place in this concept of the nation for national and ethnic minorities living within the 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 For more on the narratives of peoplehood, see Johanna Hase, ‘The Constitutional Citizen in Narratives of Peoplehood’ (2020) 2(2) Statelessness & Citizenship Review 372. Shaw (n 1) 27. János Kis, Constitutional Democracy (Central European University Press 2003) 65–66. Kriszta Kovács and Gábor Attila Tóth, ‘Hungary's Constitutional Transformation’ (2011) 7(2) European Constitutional Law Review 183. See Patricia Mindus, ‘On Population Design — Using Law to Dismantle Constitutional Democratic Institutions’ (Manuscript, 10 February 2020) (on hand with the author). Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign. The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge University Press 2016), citing Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (Privately Printed, 1642). Dieter Grimm, Sovereignty: The Origin and Future of a Political and Legal Concept (Columbia University Press 2015). 391