The eastern EU enlargement and the janus-headed nature of the constitutional treaty

Abstract

Leafing through the history of European unionism, cleavages and differences within and among socio-legal orders do not seem to have been taken on as a major concern when favorable conditions for the enlargement of the Community borders occurred. If and when a status necessitatis provided for such conditions, geopolitical arrondisages were immediately pursued, often in spite of other, not less relevant, governance issues. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the accession of Eastern European countries as EU Member States is just the last case in point at present. Hence, one wonders: is there a socio-technical archè, i.e. an original source, or core matrix, laying behind current affairs that presides over, or works for, the type of strategy that the EU adopted so far? What structural and symbolic limits or boundaries, if any, can be ascribed, or are inherent to geo-political EU incrementalism? In sum: is it there an inner format that can explain the relationship between the logic of EU enlargement and the way in which EU institutions have been constructed? As one can easily see, these questions are not rhetorical. It is even possible to reframe the above interrogatives into technical/doctrinal legal terms as follows: is it there a coherent mix in the Ratio Status et Ratio Juris of the EU enlargement process and policy? Is the ongoing mixture of the necessitas rerum jus constituit and auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem reference standards, i.e. The combination of legal realism and legal formalism, either in the form of decisionist/jusnaturalistic tenets of legal institutionalism or voluntaristic/rationalistic tenets of legal constructivism, a coherent normative framework to manage the problems raised by EU expansionism? Is the constitutionalization of the EU a plausible and socially adequate response to current and prospective EU governance systems? The leading hypothesis of this study is that the entry of Eastern European countries to the EU gives room to the official claim of there being actual subsistence in "common" European legal tradition, but by contrast exacerbates a variety of paradoxical outcomes of late-modern EU legal arrangements. This is the inevitable challenge for creating a wider and stronger European Union which has to deal with-as Szucs, following Braudel, put it-the irrepressible spatial existence of a historical variety of Europes (Western, Central and Eastern). In this respect, the temporal coincidence of EU enlargement towards Eastern countries and the drafting of an EU Constitutional Treaty not only provides us with a veritable laboratory-like field to test the consistency of the above interrogations. It also provides us with a highly problematic socio-legal scenario. © 2006 Springer.