This paper is about a counterfactual empirical assumption: If the Laeken convention had been elected, we would have had a more democratic as well as a more legitimate process of European constitution making. Electing conventioneers and re-opening the convention is probably a successful way to...

This article addresses the critical issue of how constitutional designing of the EU is related to the expression of collective identities. A European collective identity is perceived in terms of the discursive representation of the underlying demos of a European democracy. Against the common...

While in political debates identity is often considered as given, scholars of social sciences concentrate on the formation of new and particularly transnational identities. Insights from nationalism reveal mechanisms of identity formation but European integration has taken its own way. We...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the media debates concerning ratification of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (TCE) from the perspective of public sphere research and in view of the decision by the 2007 Brussels European Council to initiate a new intergovernmental...

This study investigates the role of political journalism in EU constitution-making. More specifically, we ask whether political journalists take an active role in shaping public preferences and opinion on European integration. An analytical framework is developed distinguishing between the...

In recent years, the idea that constitutional modes of government are exclusive to states has become the subject of sustained challenge. This is due to the development in regional and global sites of regulatory institutions and practices which meet criteria normally associated with...

The chasm separating elite and popular opinion on the achievements and finality of European integration was never so visible as after the negative referendums on the Constitutional and the Lisbon Treaties. The public attitude prevailing in the past has been characterized as one of permissive...

This paper puts forward the main elements of the theory of constitutional synthesis as a constitutional theory of European integration. Constitutional synthesis is both a political philosophy of European integration (which dilucidates what kind of polity the Union is an what is its basis of...

The paper analyses national parliamentary plenary debates on the Constitutional and the Lisbon Treaty in the six European states; Germany, France, Great Britain, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The comparative qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis of the plenary debates...

This paper aims at putting forward the key elements of a constitutional theory of European law on the basis of D. Neil MacCormick’s theory of European constitutional pluralism. Firstly, I consider how the institutional theory of law fleshed out by MacCormick creates the theoretical space...