La convention européenne: Argumenter et négocier dans une assemblée constituante multinationale

Abstract

In June and July 2003, the « European Convention », chaired by the former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, adopted a « draft treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe ». The analysis made in this paper aims at assessing, using the « deliberation vs. Bargaining » analytical framework as a reference, how far this process prolongs the former logic of treaty reform, and how far it innovates and comes closer to a constitutional process. Examining the decades-long trend of « constitutional revisions » in the EU since its inception, the negotiation of the Convention's mandate and the course of its work, we conclude that the logic of intergovernmental bargains was only partly altered by an ethos of « deliberation » © 2004 Presses de Sciences Po.