Europe's Constitutional Monstrosity

Abstract

Reason often falls into despair when confronted with its distance from reality. In 1667, Samuel Pufendorf realized this distance and he became furious: the political structure in which he lived, the German Holy Roman Empire, appeared to him so irregular and arbitrary that he could only call it 'monstro simile': similar to a monster.' Philip Allott may be today's Pufendorf, except that it is yet unclear whether the idea of reason he believes in is, like that of his predecessor, on the rise; in these late-modem or even post-modem times, he may well fight a losing battle. For Allott today, it is the European Union that is unbearably irregular and contradictory in its construction: he sees it as an Ungeheuer, as a monster produced, in Goya's words, by the sleep of reason.2 His vision is, instead, that of a well-ordered, coherent structure: of a unity brought about by European society in an act of 'self-constituting'. But his is only an epilogue in the volume under review, and his vision of unity is hardly shared by the other authors in it. With many different nuances, most of them agree with Allott's characterization of the irregularity of the European Union, yet they do not call it 'monstrous' but 'pluralist' or 'polycentric' and do not see anything inherently bad in it. Some even praise polycentricity as a model for the future; most, however, acknowledge it as a fact and, in pragmatic fashion, base their further theorizing upon it. In this they may be not so far from the theorists of the Holy Roman Empire, of whom one observer stated at the end of the 17th century: 'In the public law of Germany history plays the role that reason plays in the other disciplines of law'.3