ABSTRACT
Legal and political science scholars have for a long time propounded the notion that the EU has a constitution, even though both this notion and its connotations remain disputed. The European constitution resulted from a gradual process of interaction-between primary norms and the case law that interpreted them. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) acted as the leading ‘constitutionalizing actor’ by extracting constitutional principles from a body of law that also encompassed national constitutions. In parallel, Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs) were largely treated as episodes of Treaty reform. The intellectual hegemony of ‘liberal intergovernmentalism’ in the explanation of Treaty changes, and its emphasis on a model of preference aggregation that came closer to the model of normal pluralistic politics (Moravcsik 1991, 1998), had the effect of removing their consideration from the prism of ‘constitutional polities’.
