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By exploring how early political investments in favor of a European

During 2002–2003, the European Convention prepared a draft treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe that was later reshuffled into the now in force Lisbon Treaty. Although the decision‐making process at the Convention received considerable attention, little is known about the drafters themselves, both as individuals and as a group. In this article, I argue that the drafting of the constitutional treaty can be described as a process of social construction/political mobilization in which a transnational community of legal professionals/political entrepreneurs successfully put the issue of a European Constitution on the political agenda, and later framed the debates at the Convention, where a wider circle of prominent politicians proved rather receptive to their arguments. Based on an in‐depth empirical study, including a systematic analysis of the social recruitment of the Convention, this article highlights the part played by transnational professional communities—somewhere in‐between “epistemic communities” and “advocacy networks”—in contemporary European politics.