European Constitutional Imaginaries: Utopias, Ideologies and the Other

Abstract

This paper outlines the conceptual background to a broader intellectual project that aims to study ‘European Constitutional Imaginaries’. These are understood as ideas that stand behind various conceptualisations of the EU constitution, produced by EU constitutional lawyers and theorists. The paper first explains the concept and identifies the gap in various approaches to the study of EU constitutionalism that come close to the one proposed here. It briefly discusses works by some constitutional lawyers, legal historians and legal sociologists that engaged with deeper structures of EU constitutional thought. Two particular are then made: the need to pay more attention to political economy behind constitutional theory and to the comparative dimension of how EU constitutional theory has been generated over time. In the concluding part the paper outlines the whole project.

Keywords: European integration, European constitutionalism, constitutional ideology, utopia, imaginary, constitutional history, comparative constitutional law, constitutional political economy