No.5/04
Symposium
Altneuland: The EU Constitution in a Contextual Perspective
A Conference Organized by
the
Hauser Global Law School Program and the Jean Monnet Center for
International and Regional Economic Law & Justice,
New York
University School of Law
Jointly With the
Woodrow Wilson School of Public
and International Affairs at
Princeton University
Altneuland: The European
Constitutional Terrain
It is in many respects a New Land -
for the first time the Union is openly, officially using the word Constitution
in its formal self-understanding. But this, in turn, places it, at least
lexically, in the age old terrain of constitutionalism which has been around in
its modern guise at least since the American and French Revolutions.
Altneuland captures another sense of
the current constitutional moment. For some, to judge from the hype, we are at
the dawn of a monumental change, historic in its implications. For others, if
we were to strike the odd word "Constitution" from the text of the Pending
Draft, what we would find is just the latest, quite (but not very) important
Treaty revision, in a series of revisions which has characterized the European
Union for some time. Indeed, it could be argued, that there is nothing in the
content of this Draft to justify the appellation "Constitution," all the more
so, after the cannibalism of the June IGC. Not, then, a New Land but Old Hat.
There is no Old Hat in the series of
Papers which we present here, the results of a collaboration of NYU Law and
Princeton. These are not 'Reports' on the various developments to be found in
the Draft which will now go before the European peoples. Practicing lawyers
will not reach out to these Working Papers when they ponder the significance of
Article X or Y.
We invited the contributors to
engage in a reflection au fond, critically to examine the broader and
deeper meanings of the process and its resulting text. We then seduced them to
New York City and Princeton and once here threw them into a Lion's Den of
American and European political scientists, comparative constitutionalists and
historians who all had the instruction to go for the jugular. The results, I
believe, vindicate the ordeal.
The papers are arranged in three
sections. In Part One, we included papers that looked at the project as a whole
in a comparative, historical and/or political context. Part Two includes the
papers that examined some broad, horizontal constitutional items within the
text itself. Part Three is given to papers which look at the architectural,
institutional and constitutional landmarks within the text. All repay careful
study.
JHHW
Editors:
Professor J.H.H. Weiler
- European Union Jean Monnet Chair,
Director
of the Global Law School, NYU School of Law
Provost Christopher L. Eisgruber
- Director, Program in
Law and Public Affairs and Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs
in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values,
Princeton University
Contributions:
Part I:
Part II:
Part III:
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