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8 British J. Pol. & Int'l Rel. 1 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/bhjlplcs8 and id is 1 raw text is: doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856x.2006.00229.x Constitutionalism, European Integration and British Political Economy Ben Rosamond and Daniel Wincott Introduction Even by the European Union's turbulent standards, 2005 was a remarkably event- ful year. The ignition point proved to be ratification (or more precisely the non- ratification) of the Constitutional Treaty. With nine of the 25 member states opting to put the so-called EU Constitution to domestic referenda, progress towards formal ratification was always likely to be problematic. But few would have anticipated the extraordinarily rapid demise of the treaty following decisive 'no' votes in France and the Netherlands in late May and early June. The British government, which had planned to hold its referendum relatively late in the ratification cycle (in mid- 2006), was excused a probably embarrassing defeat. That said, the Constitutional Treaty had provoked a flurry of domestic debate in which themes long familiar to students of Britain's relationship with the EU once again appeared in public dis- course. While there was much debating about supposedly new and emphatically fundamental compromises to British sovereignty, discussion of the Constitutional Treaty also provoked arguments that seemed to be relatively novel. Two themes strike us as being particularly prominent. The first is the very idea of 'constitutionalism' itself. Technically, it is inappropri- ate to describe the Constitutional Treaty as a 'constitution'. Indeed, at one level, the Constitutional Treaty, signed by the member states in October 2004, represents a simplification and rationalisation of the existing treaties together with an attempt to reorder the EU's erstwhile 'three pillar' structure into a singular framework. While the text did offer a few innovations in the manner of all previous treaty revi- sions, much of the core matter found within the Constitutional Treaty-indeed much of what its most vociferous critics latched on to-was already in situ well before the ratification debacle. However, public debate, particularly in Britain, drew breath from the idea that the treaty was a daring attempt to inaugurate a new supranational constitutional order that would shift the underpinnings of European integration quite drastically. We might even argue that such a public debate was long overdue. For example, one way of reading the history of European integra- tion is as a process where intergovernmental treaties have been 'constitutionalised', primarily through the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice and its core doctrines of 'supremacy' and 'direct effect' (Wincott 2001). This historical process has been the primary motor behind the transformation of the EU from a treaty- based intergovernmental regime to an entity representing an embedded continen- tal liberal market order underwritten by an emphatic corpus of supranational law. More obviously perhaps, the Constitutional Treaty and the Convention on the Future of Europe that preceded it were framed as exercises to bring the EU closer sa.!!• Political Studies © 2006rT'eAuthors PioalA s ition t°urudii tatyrS© 2006 Political Studies Association ro:Association BJPIR: 2006 VOL 8, 1-14

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