Complexity and Cultural Sources of Law in the EU Context: From the Multilevel Constitutionalism to the Constitutional Synallagma

Abstract

In this work I will try to analyse the latest trends of the European integration process in light of the notion of complexity, conceived as a bilaterally active relationship between diversities. This notion of complexity comes from a comparison among the different meanings of this word as used in several disciplines (law, physics, mathematics, psychology, philosophy) and recovers the etymological sense of this concept (complexity from Latin complexus=interlaced). The effort to find a common linguistic core could cause ambiguity but I would like to take the risk because only a multidisciplinary approach can catch the hidden dimension of the European process I argue that the European Union legal order is a complex entity that shares some features with complex systems in natural sciences: non-reducibility, unpredictability, non-reversibility and non-determinability.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the theory of multilevel constitutionalism by completing some points that may have been neglected in Pernice's reasoning. In the interlaced nature of the EU a very important role is played by the constitutional synallagma, which is the whole of legal and permanent flows which connect the levels (national, international, supranational, subnational), determining the outcome of the coordination process described by Pernice.

I will develop my argumentation dividing this work in two parts. In the first part I will try to introduce the notion of complexity while in the second part I will focus on the role of the cultural sources of law in the communication and exchanges among the constitutional levels.

Keywords: constitutional synallagma, multilevel constitutionalism, complexity, European constitution, cultural sources of law

JEL Classification: K00, K39