Developing a Constitution for Europe

Jurisprudencija, 2004

The idea of nation-state is confused and confusing. It sometimes refers to relatively large territorial states (as opposed to, for example, city-states like Singapore or small principalities like Liechtenstein) and sometimes to states constituted on the basis of an imagined national community whose boundaries coincide with that state’s frontiers. This implies that: (a) not all states are national territorial states; (b) not all national territorial states are nation-states – some are multi-national or have no clear national basis; and (c) not all nations are associated with their own nation-state. In the last case, this could arise because their national identity is denied political expression in the form of statehood and/or because their members are distributed among several states. This raises interesting theoretical questions, which are explored in the conceptual part of the chapter. It also raises important substantive and political questions about the character of European national identity, if any, and the future of the European Union considered as a territorial state and/or nation-state. I address these issues in part two. Lastly, I ask what a post-national world state or polity might entail and address this in terms of whether cosmopolitanism, in some form or other, can transcend national identities, rivalries, and confrontations and provide the basis for a post-national world society.

2010

The Aims of this thesis are to understand the changes of the concept of sovereignty in the international system considering the role of regional and functional arrangements and the contribution of federalism as a political theory. Federal theory is particularly important to the concept of sovereignty, particularly if one considers the diversity of federal political systems and their different historical experiences. Thus the thesis examines the federal experience of the United States throughout history and the European tradition of federalism. The present research is an attempt to emphasise the diversity of federalism as a legal and political concept and to demonstrate that federal political systems can be applicable beyond the modern state. The EU is a paradigmatic case of a regional arrangement, ‘proto-federal’ that challenges the notion of sovereignty as an exclusive statehood attribute. The thesis examines the recent decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court concerning...

2018

One of the possible next candidates for EU membership is Montenegro. A Montenegrin scholar is reflecting on the impact of European integration on national sovereignty. Against the background of the Lisbon Treaty, she is comparing the implications of EU’s arrangements on the national sovereignty of Germany, Switzerland and Montenegro.

Current History, 2015

Comparative Constitution Making

Nations and Nationalism, 2010

This article maps out the role played by national identity in modern European constitutions. It does this by comparing its impact on constitutions across Gellner's time zones of European nationalism, and shows how the impact of nationalism has increased gradually over time, and is now strongest in Central and Eastern Europe. It concludes with a reflection on why this has been the case, and why constitutional politics have increasingly lent themselves to nationalist influences in the modern era.

“Yearbook of Polish European Studies”, 2004

Contemporary European History, 2000

The campaign for the 1999 European elections, particularly in France, was articulated more clearly than ever before in terms of a rhetorical dialectic between the promotion of national interests and the construction of Europe ± although it was expressed differently by different party leaders:`We must make Europe without unmaking France' (Jacques Chirac), or`prolong and amplify the nation' (Lionel Jospin), or`put France in advance' (Franc Ëois Bayrou). All these campaign slogans ®t more or less into the framework laid down in 1995 by the former president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, when he predicted that the European Union would become a`federation of nation-states'. While the concept thus outlined was a little vague, Delors's intention was to point out the hybrid nature of an institution whose structure combined federalist tendencies with the concept of the nation-state. It provides us with a good starting point for progressing beyond the facile and all-too-frequent opposition in the European dynamic between`nation' and`federation'. 1 Previous conceptual models have, from the beginning, sought to capture the speci®c political nature of Europe somewhere between the two extremes of full national sovereignty and out-and-out federalism. The ®rst,`neorealist', model, as progressively re®ned by Stanley Hoffmann, sees European institutions as a`pool of sovereignties' through which member states freely negotiate the creation of community functions and retain a monopoly over their application. 2 The second, the`neo-functionalist', has been associated since the 1950s with Ernst Haas and sees those institutions as pre®guring a federal super-state which will inevitably appropriate the principal functions of member states owing to a`spillover' effect. 3 By contrast, the intrinsically paradoxical nature of the expression`federation of nation-states' reminds us that since the beginnings of the European enterprise the concepts of nation and of federation have been inextricably linked. At this moment