ABSTRACT
This chapter explores issues of EU treaty reform, from the Amsterdam treaty-amending process following Maastricht’s polity-creating ‘moment’ to the latest round of reforms as reflected in the recently signed Lisbon Treaty. An attempt is made also to assess the Nice experience and its much criticized revision outcome as well as to link the debate on the future of Europe to the debacle of the Constitutional Treaty. In this chapter emphasis is placed on the dynamics as well as the shortfalls of formal treaty revision since the mid1990s, in order to develop a panoramic view of Europe’s grand constitutional ‘episodes’ which, to a greater or lesser extent, marked its evolution. In doing so, the chapter also attempts to make sense of the qualities and deficiencies of the EU’s preferred mode of constitutional engineering, and whether or not the outcome of such processes can be said to correspond with an understanding of the EU as a consociation of states.
