ABSTRACT
This book begins with a radical message: the conclusion of a constitutional treaty by the European Union would not have ushered in a glorious new age of constitutions and constitution-making. Instead, the still on-going, but increasingly uncertain, effort to present Europe with its own constitutional treaty, together with the context of continuing European integration within which it is embedded, is only one step further down a road of contemporary social, political, legal and normative development, which cannot but end in a radical reformulation of our modern perceptions of constitutional provenance, constitutional application and constitutional change. This radical message is not, however, specific to European developments; nor is it limited to the telling, but conceptually restricted, observation that whatever Europe’s recent proposed constitutional treaty was, it was not a ‘Constitution’.1 Instead, the guiding contention is nothing more, nor less, than the assertion that the axiom of liberal constitutional settlement that was determinative in the formation of a modern, civilised and civilising, res publica or state is now too blunt an instrument to capture and control contemporary patterns of governing and governance, too antiquated a myth to nurture and sustain complex, questionable and questioning polities in all their myriad and contested national, supranational, post-national and transnational constellations.