The Reform Treaty and the Constitutional Finality of European Integration

Abstract

Jean Monnet’s method for realizing Robert Schuman’s objective of a ‘European Federation’ for the preservation of peace envisaged successive phases of economic, legal and political integration for “an ever closer Union”. From the 1951 ECSC Treaty up to the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, European integration law evolved on the basis of international treaties reflecting intergovernmental compromises contingent on political support for functionally limited co-operation among European states as well as among their citizens. These multilateral European integration agreements differed fundamentally from European international law prior to World War II. Yet it was only since about the year 2000 — as illustrated by the speech of Germany’ s Minister of Foreign Affairs Joschka Fischer on From Confederacy to Federation: Thoughts on the Finality of European Integration in May 2000¹ and the approval of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights ² — that “the finality” of the European integration process became a widely discussed subject of public European reasoning, prompting even pragmatic British government ministers to deliver public speeches on “Europe 2030”.³ Most of these discussions focused on the (con)federal structures among Member States, their national peoples and EU citizens, based on market integration, policy integration and an “area of freedom, justice and security”; in view of the constitutional failures of nation states, even European ‘federalists’ no longer mention a European federal state as a desirable end-state of the “ever closer Union.”

The author is grateful for research assistance by his doctoral researcher Pedro Lomba.

Reproduced in Joerges / Mùny / Weiler (2000), 19–30.

OJ C 364 of 18 December 2000.

Cf. the speech by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on Europe 2030: Model Power, not Superpower, delivered at the College of Europe, Bruges, on 15 November 2007.