ABSTRACT
After analysing different traditions of demos and ethnos, their symbolic power and political reflections in Central Europe in the 1990s, this chapter addresses the
problem of political identity within the ambit of the post-war European integration
process as well as the recent constitution-making efforts. I mainly focus on the
symbolic rationality of law and political identity constructed by the European Union
and its reflections in Central European countries. I outline the distinction between
civil and ethnic political identity within the framework of the European Union in the
context of the Central European accession states and the European Union’s political
symbolism and recent constitution-making premised on the possibility of a potential
European demos. The crux of the argument lies in comparing two models of constitution-making:
the Hobbesian vertical versus the Lockean horizontal version of the social contract.