| Abstract: |
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 has been
around in its modern guise at least since the American and French Revolutions.
Altneuland captures another sense of the current constitutional moment. For
some, to judge from the hype, we are at the dawn of a monumental change,
historic in its implications. For others, if we were to strike the odd word
"Constitution" from the text of the Pending Draft, what we would find is just
the latest, quite (but not very) important Treaty revision, in a series of
revisions which has characterized the European Union for some time. Indeed, it
could be argued, that there is nothing in the content of this Draft to justify
the appellation "Constitution," all the more so, after the cannibalism of the
June IGC. Not, then, a New Land but Old Hat. There is no Old Hat in the series
of Papers which we present here, the results of a collaboration of NYU Law and
Princeton. These are not 'Reports' on the various developments to be found in
the Draft which will now go before the European peoples. Practicing lawyers
will not reach out to these Working Papers when they ponder the significance
of Article X or Y. We invited the contributors to engage in a reflection au
fond , critically to examine the broader and deeper meanings of the process
and its resulting text. We then seduced them to New York City and Princeton
and once here threw them into a Lion's Den of American and European political
scientists, comparative constitutionalists and historians who all had the
instruction to go for the jugular. The results, I believe, vindicate the
ordeal. The papers are arranged in three sections. In Part One, we included
papers that looked at the project as a whole in a comparative, historical
and/or political context. Part Two includes the papers that examined some
broad, horizontal constitutional items within the text itself. Part Three is
given to papers which look at the architectural, institutional and
constitutional landmarks within the text. All repay careful study. |