EU CONSTITUTIONAL LAW-POLICY MAKING AND THE NOTION OF “COMMON EUROPEAN LEGAL TRADITION”

Abstract

Leafing through a variety of EU official documents, it becomes apparent that, among the communicative strategies officially enunciated to support EU processes and policies, a special relevance has been ascribed to the notion of a �common European legal tradition.� Indeed, reference to a �shared� and �settled� social, institutional and cultural context has been conceived of as a refined way to provide validity, legitimacy and social appeal to a quite recent geopolitical governance system such as that of European unionism. It is a fact, however, that, in spite of the authoritativeness of EU official statements, an important debate continues at the scientific level about the actual existence and/or consistency of such a �common legal tradition,� due to either diverging historical socio-legal developments in the various EU member states or the novelty of EU legal constructionism. The aim of this paper is to deal precisely with this issue by focusing on the way in which an extraordinarily (explicitly and implicitly) selective mixture of old and new legal tools has been applied in order to portray the EU as an historically settled constituency. Accordingly, the most important EU normative steps towards EU constitutionalisation will be discussed and critically compared to previous � modern, pre-modern and ancient � European constitutional experiences.