The Utopia of Popular Sovereignty: The Convocation of a Constituent Assembly

The objective of this paper is to make evident the political impact of popular sovereignty in the search for a new social structure, in virtue of the crisis that the representative system of party hegemony manifested, in order to point out in the first place the need of the Venezuelan people to create a nation project with the presence of participation from all the different environments and aspects of citizen activity, through a National Constituent Assembly. We next attempt to show that even with the judicial difficulty involved in this proposal, this initiative was presented to the extinct Supreme Court of Justice, and an answer was received in the form of a sentence the legal argumentation of which is based on popular sovereignty, and which was very important at that moment in justifying the right to manifest constituent power permitting the convocation of said power through a referendum. In this sense, we consider some differences between the functions of constituent power and constituted power; describing the process and the result of the convocation of the constituent assembly that manifested the will of public sovereignty, and which supposes its participation in power, a situation which distinguished popular sovereignty from public power. Finally, the paper identifies among the most significant characteristics of the new constitutional text approved by referendum, citizen participation as a constitutional right, and the means and mechanisms for this purpose, as well as the faculty of the sovereign population to convoke a National Constituent Assembly for the purpose of transforming the state, creating a new judicial ordering, and writing a new constitution. The conclusion is that this situation is the result of the materialization of utopia, but as a true ideal of popular sovereignty.