The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the type of allegiance that the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union is based on. Charters as Bills of Rights establish or entrench fundamental rights, democracy and the rule of law, and the relevant sense of allegiance and attachment...

In this essay, it is argued that legal and political argument on the European constitution requires putting forward a normative conception of the constitution. Next to the formal and material understandings of the constitution, there is a need for a conception that determines the legitimacy...

In this paper the relationship between constitution and state is analysed. The EU's constitutional structure is evaluated according to three ideas of constitutionalism: the evolutionary or functionalist idea; the power-binding idea; and the power-establishing or revolutionary idea. It is found that...

This paper examines the Convention on the Future of Europe in terms of whether its work bears the imprint of a constitutional treaty or a constitution proper. Two constitutional visions for the EU are presented - deep diversity and constitutional patriotism - and assessed in relation to the...

Joseph Weiler's Un'Europa Cristiana argues that there should be an explicit reference to the Christian roots of European identity in the Preamble of an eventual European Constitution. Such a claim requires discussing the groundings of European identity, its relation with personal and collective...

It belongs to the conventional wisdom that national parliaments have increasingly lost in overall importance due to the evolution of the EU’s political system. By passing subsequent Treaty amendments and revisions they accepted shifts of competencies to the European level,which reduced their...

The overarching question that informs this chapter is whether the Laeken process (after the Laeken Declaration of 2001 that gave the Convention its mandate) has managed to come up with a solution to the EUs legitimacy deficit. My focus here is on the Convention and I seek to establish which...

This paper proposes to assess the representative quality of European Union decision-making by way of a micro-approach which traces the effectiveness of the mechanisms of representation that connect the European peoples to the decision-making process. In particular, it proposes to distinguish...

Within the discussion on European governance and constitutional reforms of the EU polity the so-called "open method of coordination" (OMC) has gained much attention as a procedure that occupies an intermediary place between intergovernmental cooperation and supranational legislation. In this...