Only a drop in the ocean? An attempt to classify the debate about the notion and the nature of the European Constitution

What is the ‘efficient secret’ ¹ of the European Constitution? In 1867 Walter Bagehot, the essayist and journalist, wrote one of the most important books in the history of Constitutional Law in Europe, The English Constitution, in which he attempted to ‘discover’ what made the English government so ‘special’. In order to do that, he devised the very well known formula of the ‘efficient secret’. Bagehot identified it as ‘the close union, the nearly complete fusion, of the executive and legislative powers’. ² While the fusion described by Bagehot in these lines is a horizontal one connecting two different powers existing at the same level (focusing on the frame of government), I am going to argue that the secret of the European Constitution can be identified in a vertical fusion connecting national and supranational legal orders, a fusion that makes the EU an ‘interlaced’ (i.e. complex) legal system.