From Nice to the Constitutional Treaty: Eight Theses on the (Future) Constitutionalisation of Europe

Abstract

Who now remembers Europe’s Constitutional Treaty? There was however a relatively easy road from Nice to the Laeken Declaration and then to the work of the Convention and the drafting of the first document in the history of European integration risking the “Constitution” banner on its front page, even if it finally had to be modestly renamed as a “Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe”. Compared to the draft Constitution prepared by the European Parliament in the follow-up to the Maastricht Treaty, whose promoters were quickly branded as old fashioned federalists, the momentum surrounding the elaboration of the Constitutional Treaty was a happy one. The discussion about a Constitution for Europe and the debate on the future of Europe became a significant political issue and it was even made — by Jürgen Habermas, particularly — intellectually fashionable. It seemed suddenly as if the destiny of the European continent — the big question marks about Europe’s identity, its specific response to the challenges posed by globalisation, the defence of its values and the promotion of its ideas of citizenship and mixed economies — had to be necessarily linked to the fate of the final results of the Convention.