Identity, Constitution-Making and the Enlargement of the European Union

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.