Constitutional Settlement: A Governance Framework for Multi-Sovereign Clearing Systems

Cross-border financial infrastructure is among the most consequential and least constitutionally constrained domains of global governance. Clearing and settlement systems allocate access, enforce compliance and impose restrictions at global scale, yet they operate through concentrated administrative authority exercised within national jurisdictions — with unilateral enforcement, opaque process, indefinite restriction and little recourse. This paper argues that the resulting vulnerability is institutional, not technological, and proposes constitutional settlement: a clearing architecture in which enforcement authority is bounded by procedural rules embedded at the infrastructure level. Four elements do the work — mode-bounded enforcement separating routine, incident and emergency conditions; multi-sovereign quorum for high-impact restrictions; automatic sunset, so that sustained restriction requires affirmative renewal rather than mere continuation; and embedded due process with notice, evidentiary standards, appeal and transparency. The framework is deliberately implementation-agnostic. It proposes no currency and no platform, dilutes no AML/CFT obligation, and may be layered onto existing clearing utilities or distributed ledgers. Implementation is incremental, through voluntary middle-power coalitions operating narrow corridors. The claim is that procedural constraint is not friction but a stability mechanism — it reduces uncertainty, distributes responsibility, and institutionalises reversibility in a domain where false positives propagate globally and are rarely undone.