Abstract: The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) is understood as an important new "instrument" in the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) "toolbox", designed to respond to the contemporary security environment as well as to overcome the inaction and hesitancy of the past....

Altneuland: The European Constitutional Terrain It is in many respects a New Land - for the first time the Union is openly, officially using the word Constitution in its formal self-understanding. But this, in turn, places it, at least lexically, in the age old terrain of constitutionalism which...

No matter how one evaluates the product of its work, the Convention on the Future ofEurope has marked a turning point in the history of European integration. This article is divided into three parts. The first presents the different actors who participated in the Convention and the cleavages...

This article offers an institutionalist explanation of French preferences on the future of Europe from the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 through the Constitutional Treaty of 2004. It argues that the autonomous institutional logic of the constitution-drafting exercise increasingly shaped the...

Abstract: On June 30, 2009, the German Constitutional Court declared the Lisbon Treaty to be compatible with the German constitution. The Lisbon decision marked the end of an intense constitutional battle. The following text illustrates how different views on and different understandings of...

After consecutive treaty amendments during the 1990s, the EU looks set for a conclusive revision through the process embodied by the Convention. Is the EU approaching what Joscka Fischer has coined the finality of European integration? This paper discusses the prelimininary results as well as...

The negative referendum results in France and the Netherlands have been construed as signs of a deep gap between the European Union’s leaders and its people(s). Treaty-making/change in the European Union has historically been conducted through an intergovernmental, executive-style approach,...

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...

The article explores whether the Constitutional Treaty may provide more legitimacy for governance in the European Union. After presenting a list of normative criteria, relevant parts of the Constitutional Treaty are summarised and evaluated. It is concluded that the Constitutional Treaty's...

This article analyses the impact of the EU's new Constitutional Treaty on the parliaments of its member states, with specific focus on access to information and on monitoring compliance with the subsidiarity principle. The main argument of the article is that while the Constitutional Treaty will...