ABSTRACT
The history of political integration is long and libraries can be fi lled with books about political union (Hix and Hoyland, 1999 , 2011 ; Wallace and Wallace, 1996 ; Rissen-Kappen, 2008 ), European federalism (Bogdandy, 1999 ) and the question of a European belonging and imagined communities (Anderson, 1991 ). The aspirations towards a constitution of the European Union (EU), 2 a process that failed in 2005 with the two negative referenda in both the Netherlands and France, have evoked, as much as many other issues, much academic debate and dispute. Especially in Germany the discourse was much shaped by juridical arguments and hence plunged for decades into manifold and detailed discussion about European federalism or ‘ Staatenbund ’ vs ‘ Bundestaat ’. 3 The political sciences discourse on the other hand concentrated more on multi-level governance features, neo-functionalist theories of market integration as well as their respective spill-over effects (Jachtenfuchs, 1996 , 2010 ; Scharpf, 2002 ). Until today, the common feature of both of these branches on how a future European Union could be and what it could look like is that most citizens of European member states have never heard of them.
