ABSTRACT
What is wishfully thought as the construction of Europe could be more accurately depicted as a series of heterogeneous and competing enterprises – political, bureaucratic, legal, academic, economic, but also military and police – partly coordinated and in tune with one another, partly autonomous and out of tune with each other. At regular intervals, a treaty is intended to give the appearance of a ‘construction’ to this ‘configuration’, in particular by merging institutions or at least streamlining the division of labour between institutions resulting from these various enterprises. This constantly renewed political and juridical order tends to record the endogenous practices of these different institutions, now formalized by a series of competences, rules and procedures, legalizing this division of labour. The treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe does not escape this logic. Except that, for the first time in the history of European integration, under the impact of the enlargement of the European Union (EU) to the countries of eastern Europe and the implementation of a common security and defence policy that tend to accentuate the interdependences and/or to blur the boundaries between the Council of Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Western European Union and the EU, the drafters had to proceed to a global reconfiguration of the division of labour that imposed itself after the Second World War.1
