This chapter, which will appear in the forthcoming Research Handbook on EU Constitutional Law (edited by Leonard Besselink, Nicola Lupo and Mattias Wendel), provides an overview of the development of EU constitutional theory – the field of scholarly inquiry concerned with the broader and deeper questions of the basic…

  This chapter introduces the whole volume, explaining briefly the concept of constitutional imaginary first, based on our previous work, and also the key aim of the book: to “turn the tables” between the “old” and post-communist Europe, letting the latter to speak for itself and define the terms of…

It is a rare thing for an historian to have access to sources which chart the entire history of a state, from planned creation to pre-meditated extinction. Nor is every state’s constitutional and political history as varied as that of Czechoslovakia, which was founded on 28 October 1918 and ceased…

  The development of democratic constitutionalism in Portugal in the last (almost) 50 years has been marked by some important debates, which still influence different views and interpretations of the Constitution. I would like to highlight two of them: first, a discussion of the nature and limits of the ‘constitutional…

  It has been said that countries in East-Central Europe have their own brand of constitutionalism which celebrates the idea of national sovereignty. I shall argue that, when the question of sovereignty is treated in the framework of cultural imaginaries, we realise that this region’s constitutionalism is actually much less…

This chapter builds on the assumption that constitutional references to the historical constitution can contribute to the community building process in Hungary. While this assumption itself might be contended, this paper puts aside the question whether the Hungarian historical constitution could be revived in legal terms or whether it could…

The French imaginary is a Republican imaginary that is premised on political liberty. The red thread across the political thought and the various constitutions of France has been the pursuit of the ideal political regime that would best realise political liberty and the general interest. That approach stands in stark…

  The European Union (EU) is imbued by the legacy of the empire. Practically all of its Member States have been either former colonial powers or former colonial subjects. The eastern part of the EU has a specific baggage and legacy that it brings to the EU. After 1989 the…

  The project of constitutional democracy and the rule of law concept served as a powerful unifying platform for political compromise during the liberal democratic transformation after 1989. Today’s challenge to the liberal rule of law calls for re-evaluating our understanding of that period. To provide a deeper historical perspective,…

  The traditional narratives of Austrian constitutional law are evolving. Long decried by scholars and practitioners to be “in ruins”, the Austrian Constitution has recently been lauded as “elegant and beautiful” by Austria’s President, thus attempting a paradigm shift in the Austrian public’s perception of its constitution. While some textbooks…

  This chapter explores the transforming constitutional imaginary of the Scandinavian welfare states. Suggesting that the Nordic countries shared a distinctive interpretation of the democratic ideals during the heydays of the social democratic welfare state, the chapter argues that the breakthrough of neoliberalism has fundamentally transformed the Nordic constitutional imaginary.

  The chapter explores how alternative futures were imagined in the late state-socialist system, using Soviet Estonia as a case study during the mid-perestroika period in the Soviet Union. In 1987–88, Estonian reformist intellectuals and experts envisioned Estonia in multiple scenarios like an economically “self-manageable” republic within a renewed Soviet…

On the basis of Ackerman’s established classification of legitimate constitutional pathways (revolutionary, establishment and elite), this chapter considers the boundaries of the said pathways, particularly those of the revolutionary and the elite models. I do so by means of considering two case studies: Poland (an example of the revolutionary pathway…

  The paper intends to explore the roots of Polish ‘constitutional crisis’ by utilising the concept of constitutional drift. The paper argues that while Polish 1997 Constitution contains provisions that would enable for interpreting it by using the lenses of Sciulli’s societal constitutionalism (which we call the ‘societal imaginary’), such…

  Throughout history, reference to the historical constitution of Hungary, which was the uncodified constitution of the state for a thousand years, was used to achieve different and sometimes conflicting goals. Since 2012, the historical constitution has become a constitutional concept after decades of abandonment. It appears in the Fundamental…

  The article is interested in the ways that Estonia’s self-perception changed in relation to Europe over the Soviet years and during the re-establishment of the independent state. More specifically, the focus is on co-articulating the “Soviet question” in relation to the “European question”: in what ways did the decades…

  The aim of this chapter is to offer a study of the position of Europe (and European integration) in the Italian constitutional imagination. The argument tracks three moments which have shaped the way European integration (and more generally the horizon of European political unity) has been perceived by Italian…

Making a constitution is about making political identity and creating political community. This paper investigates how the Hungarian Fundamental Law (entered into force in 2012) and its amendments have been based on constant enemy creation. In the first section, the theoretical framework of enemy- and identity construction of the Orbán…

Vicarious identification, or ‘living through another’ refers to the way actors appropriate the achievements and experiences of others to gain a sense of purpose, identity and self-esteem. This chapter proposes that vicarious identification with ‘Europe’ has been constitutive for Estonia’s pooling of important aspects of its sovereign power with the…

Britain’s constitutional evolution falls within the mainstream of European constitutional traditions, but the gulf between its governing practices and those adopted in the European mainstream has grown progressively wider. While most European nation-states have adopted written constitutions at critical moments of modern history, Britain continues to adhere to the traditional…

The Polish constitutional imaginary is an eclectic set of ideas, often contradicting or potentially conflicting with each other. This feature is partly the result of the complexity of Polish history, the leitmotif of which has revolved around regaining and maintaining independence for several centuries. This chapter analyses the relationship between…

Since 2015 the Law and Justice government has significantly altered the composition of the Polish Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, and the National Council of Judiciary. It has also expanded the power of the executive branch in relation to the courts. This process – which the majority of scholars and…

Contrary to the widespread narrative in both Polish and European constitutional law discourse, this chapter argues that Polish constitutional law theory, as it evolved in the years 1944-1989, was an active subject rather than a passive object in the process of the transition from the authoritarian socialism to constitutional democracy.

The study presents the impact of historical traditions on the making and application of law through a specific example. The regulation of nationality, a pivotal field of constitutional law, is considered a sovereign right of the Hungarian state, which is exercised in line with Article G) of the Fundamental Law…

There are, indeed, at least two cultures of knowing, with a certain claim to authority, what the law is. Each comprises, within itself, a peculiar pair of opposites. One of these cultures is, possibly, continental European, while the other is, most definitely, US American. In both, legal scholarship comes in…

This article seeks to establish which scholars of European constitutional law produced particularly influential “constitutional imaginaries” – coherent visions of the EU and its legal and political order, anchored in some (explicit or not) ideology. After introducing the broader research agenda, within which this article is situated, part II discusses…

This paper aims to cast light on the relative silence of French scholarship in the contemporary transnational debate about EU constitutional matters. It seeks to understand why, over time, French scholarship has increasingly been muted. The argument put forward to explain this observation rests on the history of the professional…

The title of this article refers to a passage in the book Brokering Europe by Antoine Vauchez who wrote that ‘the reinvention [of European law] that we can conveniently place under the banner the “constitutionalization of Europe” flourished most particularly in the hills of Fiesole between Badia Fiesolana and the…

This paper is the introductory chapter to Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe (OUP 2021). The book recounts the transformation of Europe from the interwar era until the euro crisis, using the tools of constitutional analysis and critical theory. Interwar liberalism, rocked by mass politics and social inequality,…

In this essay, we challenge the characterisation of European law as a constitutional order from two related standpoints, namely, the ambiguity of what is meant when characterising European law as constitutional, and the lack of a well-argued narrative explaining how European law became constitutional and what type of constitutionalism it…

This chapter draws on the theory of societal constitutionalism to analyse polysemy and polyvalence of the European constitutional imaginaries. It argues that European constitutional imaginaries have to be distinguished from the imagination of EU constitutional theory as much as European political ideologies and utopias. They spontaneously evolve in European society…

In response to the rise of authoritarianism in Poland and Hungary, several prominent scholars have called upon the EU to intervene in order to protect its constitutional values. One of the strongest albeit controversial arguments in favour of an intervention is that the EU is a form of transnational ‘militant…

This paper argues that the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) created at Maastricht conformed to the neoliberal theory of interstate federalism in seeking to constitute structural conditions that circumscribed the effective exercise of activist public authority at both the Member State and European level. A response to a perceived ‘crisis…

This chapter traces changes in EU-official discourse around EU legitimacy since the 1950s, relating them to the trajectory described by Pierre Rosanvallon in Democratic Legitimacy (2011a). Accordingly, the legitimacy of modern democracies broke down in the 1980s owing to a loss of faith in its two main foundations in elections…

Understanding the European Union (EU) as an autonomously constitutional entity—what this volume evocatively calls the EU’s ‘constitutional imaginary’—has been central to judicial decision-making and legal scholarship on European governance over many decades. If our aim, however, is to understand what European governance actually is, rather than what the dominant discourse…

This paper scrutinizes Jürgen Habermas’s concept of constitutional patriotism—and its basis in his discourse theory of democracy and law—as the substance of a European public philosophy. Drawing on critical theorists’ reception of the concept and Habermas’s own contemporary writings on Europe’s crisis, I reconstruct constitutional patriotism from the analytic perspective…

This article argues that reading Transformation today may help us understand the limits of liberal constitutional imaginary, on which Transformation builds and which it helped to establish in the 1990s. Now, when ‘Western liberalism’ is on retreat, such critical reading may be indispensable for those who look for alternatives. The…

Imaginary is both a goal and a map charting the path to that ideally imagined socio-political construction. Ideas matter and, indeed, human beings make things with words, especially in the social reality, but there is no direct or linear trajectory between the concepts, on which a given imaginary is built,…

Since the 1980s prominent scholars of European legal integration have used the example of U.S. constitutionalism to promote a federal vision for the European Community. These scholars, drawing lessons from developments across the Atlantic, concluded that the U.S. Supreme Court had played a key role in fostering national integration and…

I welcome Jan Komárek’s project to engage in a history of “European Constitutional Imaginaries” as seen through EU law landmark theories and most prominent authors. Some malicious minds would think of it as yet another avatar of the “scholastic bias” that structurally incites us scholars to transform our professional anxieties…

This paper explores the recent history of the European constitutional imaginary. It argues that the constitutional imaginary that solidified during the early decades of European integration has been deeply challenged in the 1990s, with the emergence of a body of thought known as ‘constitutional pluralism’. In order to do so,…

The article interrogates Neil Walker’s theory of constitutional pluralism in order to bring out the importance of ideas for how we theorise the EU legal order. To that end, the article introduces two conceptual tools or prisms, the imaginary and the unconscious. The first part of the article situates Walker’s…

Postwar Europe is partly reconstituted by a fear of democratic freedom, and a desire for political and economic stability. Constitutional relations are transformed over time through a mixture of political authoritarianism and economic liberalism. This takes place in a combination of domestic and supranational developments. The transformation also has a…

Author’s version of a review article published in (2019) 17 International Journal of Constitutional Law 992–1005 This is a review essay on three recently published books that seek to rethink constitutionalism and democracy in the context of European integration. The books are: Dieter Grimm, The Constitution of European Democracy…

In most his most recent accounts of European integration, J.H.H. Weiler claims that Europe was built with Messianic fervor. After the destruction and evil wrought by the Second World War, Europe was supposed to be a ‘promised land’. The article examines how Weiler conflates the narrative of the exodus with…

This paper outlines the conceptual background to a broader intellectual project that aims to study ‘European Constitutional Imaginaries’. These are understood as ideas that stand behind various conceptualisations of the EU constitution, produced by EU constitutional lawyers and theorists. The paper first explains the concept and identifies the gap in…