ABSTRACT
After having put forward in the introduction both the indicators and the research hypotheses, in this concluding chapter we examine the data collected through the country reports in order to conduct a comparative analysis of the strategic behaviour of national constitutional actors (parliaments, courts, and subnational entities) towards the supranational level and to test the initial hypotheses. We focus in particular on three main areas: the role played by national constitutional cultures in facilitating or resisting to EU integration, the potential of political discourses to determine a long-lasting constitutional change, and the importance of the form of state in providing a strengthened legitimacy to EU claims of authority within national boundaries. In doing so we lay down the founding blocks of a new bottom-up constitutional theory of EU integration that shall measure and explain the constitutional strategies in the face of multi-level governance in a dynamic and empirical way.
