ABSTRACT
The Constitution fails the democracy test The failure of the EU Constitution to gain public approval was inconvenient for EU governments but hardly surprising.1 The history of European integration has been uneven from the start, with forward momentum followed by periodic stasis. Some of the foundational thinkers who attempted to explain the dynamics of European integration saw a process driven by almost irresistible teleological forces, even predestined, ‘a series of advances and retreats along a defined road’ whose ‘general route, as well as the final goal, is assumed to be known’.2 But the process that some writers now refer to as ‘Europeanisation’ is by no means straightforward, and this latest episode is hardly exceptional. To acknowledge this, however, does not say a great deal about the particularities of the Union’s recent efforts to embrace a formal constitutional order, or for that matter about why the public resisted the recommendations of their political leaders.
