ABSTRACT
For the future historian of twentieth-century Europe it will be a difficult problem to explain why the very idea of European union became, all of a sudden, so popular among intellectuals and the public at large. Indeed, for decades the idea of a European union was merely an ideal and-what is more-a project shared by a tiny minority. As you would expect, this very large convergence on European union is made possible largely by the fact that there is no such thing as a reasonably unique concept of what this union should be. ‘Europe’ is becoming more or less by definition a good thing, irrespective of what people mean by it. Given that philosophy is, if anything, the discipline of analysing concepts, in this chapter I shall try to produce some analytical considerations relating to the very idea of a European constitution.
