A. What Kind of Constitutionalism Are We Actually Talking About?

Since the very conception of the European integration, there has been one core question that has attracted much attention and yet it remains contested and in a way unanswered till present. What is the legal nature of the European integration - a query about what integration stands for (the descriptive dimension), how it is to be explained and construed (the explanatory dimension) and eventually what it should stand for (the normative dimension). With the lapse of time, and as integration has evolved, various legal, political, economical and even broader intellectual streams of mutually shared beliefs, we should call them narratives, have emerged all offering their own and separate visions of what constitutes the most appropriate answer. Among them, however, the constitutional narrative has come out as a sort of master or dominant narrative whose answers have reached and persuaded the widest circle of influential stakeholders with the greatest impact on the social construction of the European integration.

Indeed, since the early 1980s the constitutional narrative has slowly paved its way towards the practical realization, i.e. institutionalization, of its vision of the European integration. In that it has openly competed with the other narratives (inter alia international law, statist, autonomous sui-generis narratives). These narratives have, in return, selected it as their main target and thus implicitly recognized its leading role. However, at a certain stage, which can be more or less safely located in the early 1990s, the constitutional narrative apparently felt it had won the social constructionist race and it therefore turned its attention away from competing with the other narratives to focus exclusively on the perfection of its almost taken-for-granted EU constitutional matrix.  Hence, it did not take long for the proponents of the constitutional narrative to declare that EU constitutionalism had won broad acceptance across the ideological spectrum and had consequently become the integration's dominant currency. Thereafter the constitutional narrative about European integration...