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The Constitutional Treaty as a Reflexive Constitution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Jürgen Bast

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The “Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe” elicits divergent scholarly responses. An apologetic view holds that it is the best of all possible constitutions, given the current constellations of political forces. Such a viewpoint is countered by a mixed choir of critics for whom the document is simply another treaty, a “nostalgic project,” or a merely “semantic constitution.” Some even believe that the recourse to constitutional rhetoric endangers the rational substance of the European status quo; others fear that this very conceptuality could be damaged. The present chapter endeavors to find a third approach. It offers a critical stance as regards the unfortunate, phraseological, sometimes even ideological language of the Constitutional Treaty. Simultaneously, the constitutional text is taken seriously in its normative statements. This approach aims to reconstruct the document from a point of view which depicts it, despite its contradictions, as a project with a rightful place in the tradition of Western constitutionalism.

Type
Part I: General Questions
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 11: The Unity of the European Constitution: 2nd German-Polish Seminar on the Constitutional Law of the European Union , 01 November 2005 , pp. 1433 - 1452
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by German Law Journal GbR 

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