European Constitutional Imaginaries Between Ideology and Utopia

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How can the EU be made legitimate and sustainable through (constitutional) law - and what is the role of constitutional lawyers and their ideas in creating this "sense of legitimacy"? This book seeks to answer these questions through the concept of the "constitutional imaginary": sets of ideas and beliefs that motivate and justify the practice of government and collective self-rule. Constitutional imaginaries are as important as institutions and office- holders, as they provide political action with an overarching sense and purpose recognized as legitimate by those governed. Constitutional imaginaries are 'necessary fictions' that make political rule possible, and at the same time they are ideologies which hide from view various forms of domination.

European Constitutional Imaginaries deals with a variety of questions and is split into four parts to address: the first part explores in more detail various meanings of European constitutional imaginary, as seen by different disciplines: legal sociology, political and constitutional theory, and philosophy. The second part revisits the contribution of some key authors to the creation of European constitutional imaginaries, and the third part offers various new ways of thinking about European constitutionalism. The fourth and final part examines political economy behind various constitutional imaginaries.

Written by a balanced mix of well-established authors and newer talent, European Constitutional Imaginaries promises to open debates on European constitutionalism that are necessary to understanding Europe's present predicament and its various crises, all navigated through the medium of law.

Jan Komárek, Professor of European Law, University of Copenhagen

Jan Komárek is Professor of European law at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen and iCourts - the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre of Excellence for International Courts (since 2017). Previously he worked as assistant and later associate professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2011-2017), after obtaining doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2011. He had also worked at the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2004-2006) and the Czech Constitutional Court (2009-2010 - legal secretary to the Court's president). He is the member of the Editorial Board of European Constitutional Law Review (EuConst) and European Law Open (both published by the CUP). In 2019-2024 he is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant Project (no. 803163) "IMAGINE: European Constitutional Imaginaries: Utopias, Ideologies and the Other".

1. European Constitutional Imaginaries: Utopias, ideologies and the other, Jan Komárek
Part 1: Constitutional Imaginaries of the Past, Present, and Future of Europe
2. European Constitutional Imaginaries: On pluralism, calculemus, imperium and communitas, Jiri Priban
3. European Constitutional Imagination: A whig interpretation of the process of european integration?, Marco Dani and Agustín José Menéndez
4. The European Union as 'Militant Democracy'?, Signe Larsen
5. Ideologies and Imaginaries of Legitimacy from the 1950s to Today: Trajectories of EU-Official Discourses Read Against Rosanvallon's Democratic Legitimacy, Claudia Schrag Sternberg
Part II: At The Origins of Constitutional Imaginary - The work of selected european constitutionalists revisited
6. Why Read The Transformation of Europe Today? On the Limits of a Liberal Constitutional Imaginary, Jan Komárek
7. Messianism, Exodus, and the Empty Signifier of European Integration, Alexander Somek and Jakob Rendl
8. From Constitutional Pyramid to Constitutional Pluralism: The transformation of the european constitutional imaginary in context, Hugo Canihac
9. The Imaginary and the Unconscious: Situating constitutional pluralism, Amnon Lev
Part III: Rethinking Constitutional Imaginaries for the Present
10. The Constitutional Imaginary and the 'Metabolic' Realities of European Integration, Peter L. Lindseth
11. The European Public Good and European Public Goods, Neil Walker
12. The Peoples Imagined: Constituting a Demoicratic European Polity, Kalypso Nicolaïdis
13. Constitutional Patriotism as Europe's Public Philosophy? On the Responsiveness of Post-national Law, Paul Linden Retek
Part IV: Without Political Economy: There can be no constitutional imaginary
14. On the New German Ideology, Michael A Wilkinson
15. Beyond Neoliberal Federalism? The Ideological Shade of the Eurozone's Constitutional Order after the Eurozone Crisis, Hjalte Lokdam
16. The Failure to Grapple with Racial Capitalism in European Constitutionalism, Jeffrey Miller and Fernanda Nicola
17. Constitutionalism and Powerlessness, Damjan Kukovec
18. Imaginaries of Progress as Constitutional Imaginaries, Marija Bartl
19. Conclusion: Making "the Other" Explicit, Jan Komárek