Legal Professionals or Political Entrepreneurs? Constitution Making as a Process of Social Construction and Political Mobilization1

Abstract

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.

Explaining Governance of the Judiciary in Central and Eastern Europe: External Incentives, Transnational Elites and Parliamentary Inaction

“…The professional identity of the legal experts charged with drafting the new constitution enabled them to become integrated at once into a long-standing transnational community of like-minded jurists, which recent scholarship has discovered to have influenced, if not driven, European integration from its beginnings in the late 1940s (Cohen 2007(Cohen , 2010Cohen & Vauchez 2007). Sharing a 'common judicial identity' (Slaughter 1994, p. 102), and a sense of belonging to 'the legal family', 3 this transnational community has been in existence for at least half a century and well before the fall of communism.…”

“…Members are highly mobile between nations, levels of governance and fields of practice (Cohen 2010). The networks connect up legal elites not only in the member states but also increasingly in post-communist CEE; namely high court judges, leading academics specialising in constitutional and human rights law, and legally trained policy practitioners and political dignitaries.…”

Interstitial Power in Fields of Limited Statehood: Introducing a “Weak Field” Approach to the Study of Transnational Settings

“…However, such specialization patterns cannot be equated with an overall process of autonomization. First of all, even after decades of intensive political and economic integration, all sorts of European Union‐related social fields remain deeply structured by a quasi‐diplomatic logic of geographic balance, including the most integrated domains and institutions of Europe, such as the European Court of Justice (Cohen 2010) or the European Central Bank (Lebaron 2010). Second, national professions have so far resisted the centralizing effect of EU integration (Olgiati 2008).…”

Methodological Europeanism at the Cradle: Eur-lex, theAcquisand the Making of Europe’s Cognitive Equipment

“…5 Tracking this historical process (this genealogy) requires a methodology that seizes the doctrinal but also methodological entrepreneurs that have contributed to establishing Europe's cognitive and technical equipment. While a new strand of scholarship has recently unearthed the importance of doctrinal entrepreneurs in shaping Europe's foundational pillars such as 'functionalism' (Rosamond 2015;White 2003), 'constitution' (Cohen 2010;Vauchez 2010), 'governance' (Georgakakis and de Lassalle 2012) or 'single market' (Mudge and Vauchez 2012), the role of methodological entrepreneurs shaping the related techniques of data production and collection (historical archives, economic statistics, legal compendia, diplomatic customaries, etc.) has still been given very little attention.…”