András Jakab, European Constitutional Language

The European constitutional idea sits at something of a juncture. There are signs of germination. National constitutional courts regularly refer to the judgments of other constitutional courts—if not as precedents, then certainly as authorities. The European Court of Human Rights has produced a fair number of significant fundamental rights judgments each year for some time. It has been joined in the last few years by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) as the European Union has moved into the more sensitive fields of immigration, asylum, antiterrorism, child custody, and data protection, and the ECJ has had to respond to pressing fundamental rights concerns in all these arenas. Interparliamentary cooperation has proliferated and the extensive European administrative networks have generated their own norms of governance and demands for stronger constitutional checks. However, the European constitutional idea was rejected in a very powerful way with the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty by Dutch and French voters in 2005. Since then, constitutional language has largely been eschewed by the European Union. The subsequent Lisbon Treaty was identified as a reform treaty dedicated only to institutional improvement, and no such language can be found in the institutional developments that emerged in response to the sovereign debt crisis. Its deployment as a resource to advance European system building appears to have reached its limits.

Constitution · Constitutional court · Economics · European integration · European union · European Union law · Fundamental rights · Human rights · International trade · Political science · Politics · Sovereignty · Treaty · European and International Law Studies · European Criminal Justice and Data Protection · Law