The Lisbon Treaty: EU Constitutionalism without a Constitutional Treaty? (2008) (Schriftenreihe der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Europaforschung (ECSA Austria) European Community Studies Association of Austria Publication Series #11)

By: Stefan Griller and Jacques Ziller

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Synopsis: Immediately after the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in France and in the Netherlands, I was tempted not to comply with a contract according to which I was expected to write on the Eu- pean Constitution within a very close deadline. “What is the sense of it now?” I tried to argue. “I cannot be obliged by a contract wi- out an object”. I was wrong at that time and we would be equally wrong now, should we read the Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty itself as the dead end for European constitutionalism. Let us never forget that the text rejected in May 2005 was not the founding act of such constitutionalism. To the contrary, it was nothing more than a remarkable passage in a long history of constitutional dev- opments that have been occurring since the early years of the Eu- pean Community. All of us know that the Court of Justice spoke of a European constitutional order already in 1964, when the primacy of Community law was asserted in the areas conferred from the States to the European jurisdiction. We also know that in the pre- ous year the Court had read in the Treaty the justiciable right of any European citizen to challenge her own national State for omitted or distorted compliance with European rules.