“The Emergence of Postnational Constitutionalism in the European Union”

Shaw, Jo. (1999) “The Emergence of Postnational Constitutionalism in the European Union”. In: UNSPECIFIED, Pittsburgh, PA. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Constitutions, constitutionalism and constitutional politics have become common currency of debate and discussion in European Union studies. In this article, I want to develop an argument in relational to these issues which draws upon emerging interdisciplinary and constructivist lines of thinking within European Union legal studies. The specific task is to re-examine the challenges of and to the concepts of constitution and constitutionalism when they are used as terms of analysis in the postnational setting of the European Union. Working within the framework of a set of assumptions about legal and political categories as socially constructed and about the need for legal ideas to be understood both sociologically and in relation to concepts of political power, the article seeks to identify a frame of reference which links ideas about integration as a process (and in particular the legal dimensions of that process), with constitutionalism as a process of accommodation of diverse interests within society.

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