Europe's constitutional momentum and the search for polity legitimacy

摘要

To suggest that the European Union (EU) in 2004 possesses constitutional momentum may not seem a particularly audacious claim. It might appear self-evident, in fact, that an entity going through a high-profile, self-styled constitutional experiment is imbued with constitutional momentum-witness the busy sequence of events leading from the Treaty of Nice, to the Laeken declaration, to the Convention on the Future of Europe and its draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, and, finally, following the failure in Brussels in December 2003, to the agreement on a text by the intergovernmental conference (IGC) in June 2004 to be put to the member states for ratification according to their domestic constitutional requirements.