Imagining Europe

Abstract

What can the cultural study of law tell us about the European Union (EU)? How can we study the European political imagination? This paper demonstrates that the European political imagination is both composite and multifaceted. It is structured not merely by EU law but also by the constitutional orders of the EU Member States. A cultural analysis of European law must therefore include the constitutional worldviews of the Member States. In the political imagination of most of the Member States, “Europe” plays an important symbolic role. Yet since the Member States are shaped by different ‘varieties of constitutionalism’, the meaning ascribed to “Europe” is not uniform. The study of the constitutional worldviews of the Member States, however, should not come at the expense of studying the European political imagination sustained by EU institutions. This political imagination is currently undergoing a transformation. EU authority is increasingly legitimized by appealing to the “the people of Europe” and there are calls for “European sovereignty.” This emerging European political imagination transcends the dominant view of the literature where Europe is understood as a space of “post-sovereignty.”