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...

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....

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...

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...

This paper aims to explore government preferences, cleavages, and pat-terns of coalition-formation among a variety of actors in the bargaining process on the European Constitution, across the range of twenty-five European Union (EU) member states. The study focuses on preferences concerning...

Abstract: In Europe the public role of the religions appears to be directly proportional to the fall in trust in the procedural mechanisms at the basis of the liberal democracies. Compared to the strong identities attributed to the United States and to the Islamic world Europe is accused of...

The paper examines the process of ratification of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe in the member states of the European Union, from the date of its signature in Rome on 29 October 2004 to the European Council of June 2006 which decided to prolong the period of reflection for two...

The paper examines deals with the possibility to keep the acquis of the Constitutional Treaty in terms of simplification of the EC-EU treaties and of rationalisation of the EU legal system if the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe were not to be ratified in the form it has been signed...

This paper sets out to examine the prospects for EU constitutionalism in the light of the protracted and perhaps insuperable difficulties surrounding the ratification of the 2004 Constitutional Treaty. It argues that these difficulties simply reinforce the need for thinking about the EU's...

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...