Constitutional Politics in the European Union

Abstract

One of the problems, perhaps the main problem, that the ‘Convention on the Future of Europe’ had to face when it set out to draft a constitution was not so much whether it would succeed in writing a constitution that might satisfy the majorities of European citizens and all member states; but whether it could write a constitution at all. The original sin of European constitutionalism is that it tries to apply categories (those of the constitutional discourse) that have been developed for polities which have a fundamental element of political ‘unity’, even though they can take the form of either centralised or federal states. The European Union and its preceding institutional expressions started life, instead, as a form of international co-operation. As such, there is an underlying resistance to the very idea of a fundamental political ‘unity’ between the different members of such an organisation. In this sense, the challenges that the Convention faced were both practical and theoretical, empirical and normative.