An evolutionary approach to the constitutionalism of an enlarged EU: Why will cognitive and cultural boundaries matter?

Abstract

I have tried to show how the constitutional discourses of new Member States will have an impact on EU constitutionalism. The chapter has discussed why an evolutionary approach is better equipped to understand the rationale of the constitutional discourse of the enlarged EU. Taking this approach, scholars and policy makers should pay attention to the value attributed, through the interpretation and the use of norms and principles, to the different normative sources they have within a European legal order. Therefore, I have introduced the idea that the meaning of constitutionalism in an enlarged Union can be understood only in accounting for the impact that the normative frameworks of new Member States will have in the EU on the whole. This is the reason why the normative value-namely the legitimacy and the normative meaning actually reached in social situations-of the European constitutional principles will be discovered step by step, as the constitutional discourse of the enlarged EU will be faced with new types of problems and situations. Along this path, constitutional principles and values will be assessed against their contextual pertinence in solving social conflicts and against the legitimacy they have for citizens as well. In this view, the differentiation and the pluralism coming from the new Member States could present an opportunity rather than a challenge to the constitutionalization of the EU. This joins, in some sense, the position taken by Montesquieu when talking about norms. If every society has its own norms that make social coordination possible, then the legal order that might be introduced into a society will make sense only matching the conditions and the boundaries that people draw from norms and principles-even implicitly-shared. © 2006 Springer.