One of the long-running scholarly debates on the evolution of the European Union (EU) concerns how much weight to give specific periods of treaty-making activity, in relation to the overall historical sweep of integration. For the editors of this volume, the 2000-05 period constitutes an episode of seminal importance: EU politics are fundamentally different after the experience of the Constitutional Convention, and the rejection of its work by the French and Dutch electorates. Others, myself included, will view the events of 2005 as the latest in a long series of "crises" that have allegedly afflicted the EU, crises which have sometimes slowed, but have never reversed, the main processes associated with integration. However one understands the importance of the 2000-05 period, most observers would likely agree that it comprised a "constitutional moment". For the first time, a relatively wide range of actors and groups actively debated their own collective political destiny, as citizens of the European Union.This book brings together an eclectic mix of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives to help readers assess this episode. I will not try to distill a coherent message from the diverse case studies offered. Instead, I will focus attention on three questions raised by this volume. First: what is a constitution? How one understands, theoretically, constitutionalism is a critical first step toward linking the evolution of the European constitution and integration. Second: what is a social field? Contributors to this volume deploy the notion of a social "field" (un champ) quite differently, but none of the authors explicitly defines the term. Third: why should we pay so much attention to the activities of lawyers and judges? In this book, jurists are given pride of place, as actors who, through their training and institutional positioning, have had a distinctive influence on the course of integration. Contributors are, however, rarely explicit about why and how they have chosen to study lawyers.
FOREWORD
European ConstitutionalismThe rhetoric of constitutionalization -of the Treaty of Rome -has been at the heart of scholarly discourse on legal integration for more than thirty years 1 . The discourse implies that a constitution has been constructed out of a treaty. I find the various arguments associated with this rhetoric defensible theoretically, and empirically useful. It would be an artificial, but not impossible 2 , exercise to define the term, "constitution", so as to exclude the Rome Treaty, while including most constitutions of established nation states 3 . My preference would be to start with a generic conception of the words, constitution and constitutionalism, and then to situate the EC's particular experience comparatively, relative to that of other polities.In the 1950s, a core group of diplomats sought to transform the European state system, from one based on military competition and (unstable) balance of power arrangements, to a system based on peace and economic interdependence managed by supranati...