Political Theory and the European Constitution
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Political Theory and the European Constitution Lynn Dobson and Andreas Follesdal (eds.) Routledge, London and New York, 2004, 224pp. ISBN: 0 415 34067 5. Contemporary Political Theory (2007) 6, 120–122. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300289
The collection of essays under review was written before the current impasse in the still on-going process of writing and ratifying the European constitutional treaty. This is noticeable in some of the contributions and in the more general frame of the volume, but in spite of this, the essays in the collection still maintain a topical interest. As the editors note, the book strides a midway line between optimistic and pessimistic visions of the scope and achievements of a European constitution, by addressing ‘the important interplay between normative standards and institutional design’ (p. 184) that lies at the heart of writing and judging a document of constitutional nature. Their general assessment of the process of writing the constitution and of the draft text that emerged from the Convention is that both the text and the process contribute to the normative legitimation of the European polity, but that it would be wrong to see the process as approaching an ideal-speech situation, or the constitutional text as a way of foreclosing political discussion and political conflict in the European polity. The essays comprising the volume cover three main aspects of the way in which the European constitution matters to the legitimacy of the European Union. A first group engages with the way in which writing the constitution relates to the ‘divided’ nature of the European polity; a second discusses the character of the constitution-making process itself; and the final, and more numerous group, discusses some of the substantive values underlying the constitutional document and the kind of treatment they receive in the constitutional text itself. The essays by Schmitter, McKay, and Kraus are concerned with the institutional and cultural aspects involved in combining unity with diversity in the European Union. From quite different perspectives, Schmitter and McKay discuss the ‘federal’ question. Although both remark that concerns on whether the federal label fits the EU are in the first instance a matter of semantics, their own attempts are of a more substantive nature. McKay adopts a rational choice framework to test whether the constitutional settlement emerging from the draft constitution is capable of creating a sustainable federal structure for the EU. The main thrust of his argument is that, in rational choice terms, a sustainable federation needs an incentive structure facilitating intra-elite bargaining and mediation. Although this seems to be partly in place in the EU, McKay believes that there is a fundamental asymmetry in decision-making structures between fiscal and monetary policies, Contemporary Political Theory 2007 6
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something that may affect the legitimacy and eventually the effectiveness of the EU federal system. Schmitter’s contribution is more gen
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