Constitutionalism Without Constitution: Transnational Elites Between Political Mobilization and Legal Expertise in the Making of a Constitution for Europe (1940s−1960s)

Abstract

By exploring how early political investments in favor of a European

Political Constitutionalism and the European Union

“…‘Constitutionalisation’, it has recently been argued in a similar vein, ‘came as a masterly and opportune substitute for a real constitution, and law as a convenient expedient for politics’ – ‘neutralising’ political disputes by turning them into mere ‘technical matters’. In spite (or because) of the early (French) failures to establish a European Political Community based on a Constitution authorised by the ‘Peoples of Europe’, the Court and the legal community more generally pursued the legal ‘fiction’ of a constitution. It is this fiction that logically authorised the shift from political constitution‐making to judicial constitutionalisation, with the fashioning, as Mancini later put it, of a ‘constitutional framework for a federal‐type structure in Europe,’ albeit one with a distinctively European rather than US federal flavour.…”

Reflexivity and the Construction of the International Object: The Case of Human Rights1

“…Being part of a more general sociological turn observable in both international relations (Katzenstein 1996) and European studies (Favell and Guiraudon 2009; Saurugger 2009; Georgakakis 2010; Rowell and Mangenot 2010; Kauppi 2012, forthcoming), this has helped spur a hitherto unseen interest in the sociology of Bourdieu in the context of international and European studies. Yet, unlike earlier attempts at deploying Bourdieusian sociology in the context of international law, economics, and politics (for example, Bigo 2006; Cohen 2007; Dezalay 2004; Dezalay and Garth 1996, 2002; Dezalay and Madsen 2006; Guilhot 2005; Kauppi 2005; Lebaron 2000; Vauchez 2008; Madsen, 2005), most of this new Bourdieu‐inspired constructivist political science research only marginally addresses what in many ways was the cardinal point of Bourdieu’s work (see however Pouliot 2010): his attempt at devising a reflexive sociology (Bourdieu 1980; Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron 1991; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). What have become standard social scientific notions―habitus, field, symbolic power―were for Bourdieu mostly necessary conceptual articulations of his lifelong endeavor, from his anthropological studies of Kabyle society (Bourdieu 1972) to his late defense of the autonomy of science (Bourdieu 2002b), of developing a sociology which used the insights of structuralism, yet avoided its most striking scholastic traps: that is, devising a sociological approach that studied both the objective and subjective manifestations of society without reducing society to neither of these alone.…”

Multiple Sovereignty: On Europe's Self-Constitutionalization and Legal Self-Reference

“…The history of European constitutionalism is the social history of a legal utopia pursued from the earliest stages of European integration by a very specific group of lawyers, most notably judges and advocate‐generals of the ECJ, legal experts in the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, legal advisers to national governments, and EU law theorists. The strategy of depoliticising European integration by legalising and constitutionalizing it led to the emergence of a controversial European jurisprudence legitimizing “constitutionalism without a constitution” (Cohen 2007, 113). The impossibility of achieving a European constitution in the 1950s (Griffiths 2000) led to the gradual constitutionalization of European law by the ECJ.…”