The EU's Unresolved Constitution

This paper examines the long evolution of the EU’s unresolved constitution. Where the state is generally considered as a culturally prior, comprehensive, exclusive, monopolistic, singular, accomplished, determinate and settled political form and constitutional polity, the EU remains an accessory, partial, complementary, competitive, composite, incipient, indeterminate and disputed political form and constitutional polity. Over the last 15 years, as the relatively consensual law-centred focus of the EU’s early and ‘thin’ constitutional settlement has come under increasing strain, the unresolved nature of the EU constitution has become more palpable. In this regard, the failed Big ‘C’ constitutional project has to be seen as the symptom of a continuing problem rather than as some kind of 'closure' event. The challenge to EU constitutionalism today is to stand above the various and divisive polity visions with which it is often and self-defeatingly associated in the name of an expressive commitment to the very idea of a European common good notwithstanding these different polity visions